Abstract
In order to investigate the effects of mother tongue on infant vocalization during the prelinguistic stage, a cross-linguistic experiment was done using adult judgements of infant babbling samples in four different languages. The languages were Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and the age levels were 6, 8, 10 months. The experiment used adult listener judgements in which two groups of Japanes adults, expert and non-expert, listened and identified native infant babbling from a combination for the three different age samples.
The following findings were obtained from the study.
1) The total rate of identification on the samples was 73.8%. However, there were rate differences between judgement conditions.
2) The identification rate was low for the Japanese-Korean pair and high for the Japanese-Chinese one.
3) Concerning the age level, both listening groups obtained a high rate of identification at 10 months, but a rate difference was observed on the 8 month sample between the two groups.
These findings suggest that an identifiable language difference in babbling emerges at about 10 months of age in infancy, and that the mother tongue apparently does have an effect on prelinguistic vocalization in infants.
