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From babbling to speech: A re-assessment of the continuity issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Marilyn May Vihman ,
Marlys A. Macken ,
Ruth Miller Hazel Simmons  and
Jim Miller
Marilyn May Vihman
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Marlys A. Macken
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Ruth Miller Hazel Simmons
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Jim Miller
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

Controversy exists over whether there is any connection between children's babbling and the development of the adult sound system. The classic proponent of the discontinuity school is Jakobson 1941/1968, who claimed that the pairing of sound and meaning drastically alters the child's sound system. Jakobson's arguments for discontinuity are here evaluated on the basis of data on the transition from babbling to speech in a single set of children recorded weekly in two contexts: mother-child interaction and solitary play. Using the data from the mother-child context, and comparing the sound system of babbling with that of the early words in terms of the distribution of consonants, vocalization length, and phonotactic structure, we find striking parallelism between babbling and words within each child, across time and within time period. The data constitute strong evidence for continuity.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 397 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1981 LSA Annual Meeting in New York. We would like to thank Alan Cruttenden, Charles A. Ferguson, John H. V. Gilbert, Jeri Jaeger, Lise Menn, and John Rickford for their helpful comments. We are also grateful to Lincoln Moses for suggesting the distance-function permutation test. Above all, we thank the mothers who participated in our project for their unfailing patience and enthusiasm—and, of course, the children, for the pleasure of watching their talents unfold. Our work was carried out under a grant from the National Science Foundation (BNS 7924167).

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