The emergence of the speech capacity / D. Kimbrough Oller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oller, D. Kimbrough.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language acquisition.

Oral communication.

Animal communication.

Primates.

Language and languages--Origin.

Language and languages.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (447 p.)

Place of Publication:

Mahwah, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Recent studies of vocal development in infants have shed new light on old questions of how the speech capacity is founded and how it may have evolved in the human species. Vocalizations in the very first months of life appear to provide previously unrecognized clues to the earliest steps in the process by which language came to exist and the processes by which communicative disorders arise. Perhaps the most interesting sounds made by infants are the uniquely human 'protophones' (loosely, 'babbling'), the precursors to speech. Kimbrough Oller argues that these are most profitably inter

Contents:

Book Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; 1 Interpretation of Communication Systems: The Role of Infrastructural Modeling; 2 Myths About Babbling and the Tradition of Transcription; 3 Reversing the Field: The Recognition of Protophones; 4 Infraphonology: Overview and Central Results; 5 Keys to an Infrastructural Approach; Infraphonology as a Basis for Vocal Comparisons; 6 The Grounding of Vocal and Gestural Development in Biology and Experience: Physical Foundations for Speech and Sign Language; 7 Canalization Results: The Stability of Protophone Development in a Variety of Contexts

8 Limits on the Disruption of the Canalized Rattern of Babbling9 An Expanded View of the Landscape in Infant Vocalizations: Infrastructure for Sounds and Functions in Babbling; 10 Protophones and Other Vocalizations; 11 Primate Vocalizations in the Perspective of Infraphonology and Infrasemiotics; 12 Infrastructural Properties of Communication in Human and Nonhuman Primates; 13 Possible Stages of Vocal Evolution in the Human Family; 14 Comparing Fixed Vocal Signals Across Humans and Other Modern Primate Species; 15 Infrastructural Pursuits in Vocal Development and Evolution; References

Author IndexSubject Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-395) and indexes.

ISBN:

1-282-32563-9

1-4106-0256-7

9786612325632

0-585-36178-9

9781410602565

OCLC:

476266755