Articulatory Acquisition and Behavior

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This book is an attempt to bring articulation, as studied by the speech pathologist, within the main-stream of present-day psycho-linguistic thought. The methods and models of descriptive linguistics, instrumental phonetics, and learning theory offer a promising new framework in which to understand articulacy behavior and to assess procedures for articulacy correction. My approach, however, has been directive, not comprehensive. Basic information from linguistics, the behavior sciences (especially learning theory), and instrumental phonetics is, for the most part, introduced only when needed to underline certain issues of articulacy acquisition or behavior. In addition, articulacy behavior associated with organic or severe psychogenic involvement is not treated.

This book will focus the vocal behavior of infants prior to the development of a language system. The child's sound productions are charted and their relation to other variables is reviewed. In addition, conditioning models are used to generate hypotheses about the origin and development of prelanguage utterances.