ABSTRACT Previous scholars have claimed that the child's babbling (meaningless speech-like vocalizations) includes a random assortment of the speech sounds found in the languages of the world. Babbled sounds have been claimed to bear no relationship to the sounds of the child's later meaningful speech. The present research disputes the traditional position on babbling by showing that the phonetic content of babbled utterances exhibits many of the same preferences for certain kinds of phonetic elements and sequences that have been found in the production of meaningful speech by children in later stages of language development.
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