Sound-meaning correspondences in babbling

The hypothesis that prelinguistic vocalizations contain extensive and systematic sound-meaning correspondences was examined through an exhaustive analysis of the babbling of five infants in their second year. These infants were videotaped over a period of three to six months at home and at a day-care centre. Their babbled utterances were transcribed phonetically and categorized according to consonant-type and vowel-type. Contexts for each utterance were also categorized, primarily according to the infant's simultaneous action. A quantitative analysis of co-occurrences between phonetic and contextual categories determined that across infants between 14 and 40% of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency. These findings support Halliday's (1975 a ) notion that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relations that are not adult-modelled. They also extend the notions of continuity between prelinguistic and linguistic stages of development to the semantic domain.