ABSTRACT
The developmental milestone widely understood to mark the beginnings of speech production is the emergence, in the middle of the first year of life, of canonical babbling. The approach makes a sharp distinction between categorical, abstract grammatical knowledge of language, or competence, and the perception and production of speech, or performance. Children’s vocalizations, in turn, were found to have an effect on 1adult listeners, who saw infants who produced more speech-like vocalizations as more developmentally promising, socially appealing and “intentional” overall. The idea is that infants experience as particularly salient and memorable patterns in input speech that find an echo in their own vocal practice. From the perspective of speech processing, studies using computational modeling have begun to provide ideas as to the representation of linguistic knowledge in multiply layered and linked systems or networks. For adults, for example, A. Shook and V. Marian focus on the special problem posed by bilingual comprehension.
