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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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Both deaf and hearing infants produce many speech-like sounds in their
first years of life. Hearing children in American-English language
environments have shown to follow specific preferred patterns of combining
consonant-like and vowel-like sounds when canonically babbling. In
the present study concerning infants in the Dutch language environment,
we investigated whether they show the same preferred patterns. In particular
this paper concentrates on the question as to how far deaf or severely
hearing-impaired children differ from their hearing peers with respect
to their utterance structures. Utterances of five hearing and five
deaf Dutch children from 10.5 to 17.5 months of age were analyzed for
a number of speech characteristics, like phonation and articulation
type, number of syllables, utterance structure, place of articulation
and preferred combinations of vowel-like and consonant-like elements.
Results show that although deaf children produce many multi-syllabic
utterances, alternations of CV movements are scarce compared to hearing
children. Moreover the preferred patterns of the Dutch children deviate
from those of American-English children.
Bibliographic reference. Koopmans-van Beinum, Florien J. / Doppen, Lillian (2003): "Development in utterance structures of deaf and hearing infants", In ICPhS-15, 1033-1036.