The Emergence of Speech Patterns (continued)

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As mentioned previously, prespeech sound making changes to reflect the input language. The CV pattern in early phonetic development has been found in both Indo-European languages, such as English, Arabic, and Hindi, and in non- Indo- European languages, such as Mandarin. By age 1, however, language-specific patterns, such as specific speech-sound combinations and frequency of occurrence are evident (Chen & Kent, 2005).

Many speech sounds will develop sound-meaning relationships. Called phonetically consistent forms (PCFs) (Dore, Franklin, Miller, & Ramer, 1976), these sounds function as words for an infant, even though they are not based on adult words. A PCF is a consistent speech-sound pattern, such as "puda," created and used by a child to refer to an entity, such as the family cat. A child may develop a dozen PCFs before he or she speaks first words. Although PCFs have relatively stable sound and syllable forms, the prosodic pattern is even more consistent. PCFs are found across children regardless of the language they will later speak (Blake & deBoysson - Bardies, 1992).

PCFs may be a link between babbling and adultlike speech in that they are more limited than babbling but not as structured as adult speech. Characterized as meaningful babbling, PCFs display the creative role of a child as a language learner. A child does not use PCFs just because adult models are too difficult. Rather, he or she gets the idea that there can be sound-meaning relationships. Thus, the child demonstrates a recognition of linguistic regularities.