What develops first consonants or vowels?

“Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech”.

 Mampe, Friederici, Christophe & Wermke, 2009

From birth, newborns gradually acquire specific knowledge about what their native language sounds like by listening to the language around them.

Around 6 months, when infants have had the chance to acquire more language experience, changes start to occur in the way speech sounds are perceived.

At this stage, infants gradually improve the way they perceive the existing differences between speech sounds, and they find out which combinations or sequences of sounds are more frequent.

These changes are difficult to detect at home, but have been studied in controlled conditions like those of a research laboratory.

From six months, infants start “tuning in” to the sounds of their native language

Whereas a new-born can perceive all the speech sounds of the entire world’s languages (about 600 consonants and 200 vowels), at around 6 months of age, infants start to lose the ability to tell apart many sounds that are not used contrastively in their native language (that is, sounds where a change from one to the other doesn’t mark a change in meaning in that language). This phenomenon has been called perceptual narrowing or perceptual reorganization. So, for example, a child exposed to English loses the ability to tell the difference between different types of ‘t’ sound (e.g., a dental /t/ and a retroflex /t/), whereas a child exposed to Hindi or Urdu would retain this ability as the differences in sounds are used to mark differences in meaning in those languages.

Perceptive reorganization is a gradual phenomenon that allows us to discover and learn words.

These changes in sound perception occur gradually. Changes affecting vowel sounds seem to happen first (around 6 months), with changes to consonant coming a bit later (around 10-12 months). It is easy to understand why perceptive changes affect vowels first: vowels are longer, more audible and stable than consonants, which are short and change in fluent discourse.

Infants don’t just discover the sounds of their language, they also learn about the sequences in which these sounds can occur and how frequently they are used in adults’ speech. Existing studies demonstrate that nine-month-old infants show a preference for words made of possible sound combinations in their mother tongue, like “find” in English, as opposed to impossible or infrequent combinations like “fnid”.

This demonstrates that regular exposure to language allows infants to develop rich knowledge of the phonetic features of language. This knowledge will be crucial for language acquisition, as it helps infants to discover and learn their first words.

Being able to differentiate contrastive sounds is a good beginning for language learning

Changes in sound perception that take place from 6-12 months, are a good indicator of an infants’ language learning progress. They are the result of having heard lots of language and they are linked children’s discovery of their first words. We could say that, during this period, babies are becoming “experts” in their native language.

Yet, this “perceptual reorganization” comes at a cost. At that same time as babies are ‘tuning in’ to their native language, they are also ‘tuning out’ languages that they don’t hear regularly. So, when we study a second language as adults, the learning we did as babies makes it difficult for us to hear differences in foreign languages. For examples, Japanese adults, show difficulties in producing and hearing the difference between “l” and “r” sounds , because their language does not use these sounds contrastively (to changes the meaning of words). Consequently, adults learning a second language may speak with a foreign accent and it can be very difficult for them to achieve native-like pronunciation.

A child typically will develop language as follows:

0-6 months (Prelinguistic Phase)
Very young babies communicate using facial expressions ( a frown, smile, or raised eyebrows) and eye contact. They will begin to use different cries to express different needs. This is the beginning of intonation in speech. At about 2 months a baby begins cooing; making repetitive vowel sounds. They start  to show pleasure and by varying their voice, including increase and decrease in volume and pitch. The baby should also begin to recognise different people’s voices, and smile with pleasure when they hear a voice they recognise, such as a parent. The ability to localise sound also develops around this time. The baby will turn his/her head to the direction of the sound. In a few more months a baby can tell that speech sounds are matched by the speaker’s mouth movements. The baby will slowly being to imitate and mirror these mouth movements. This is a vital step in language development. Like a conversation without words and lays the foundation for later conversations with words.

6-8 months
Consonant sounds appear about 6-7 months. For the first time the baby has the muscle control needed to combine the consonant sound with a vowel sound. This is the start of babbling. Early babbling involves repetitive strings of the same syllables such as dadadada or yayayayaya. In these early months babies produce a type of babbling called ‘jargon’, a string of different syllables often with sentence like inflections. Parents are encouraged to imitate the baby’s sounds in order to help language development.
Babbling is an important part of language development. It is the preparation for spoken language. Infant babbling gradually acquires some of the intonational pattern of the language they are hearing. A baby’s babbling will have rising intonation at the end of the string of sounds and seems to signal a desire for a responds and falling intonation requires no response. They will also begin to imitate the sounds that the parents are making in order to try and communicate with them.

9-11 months
At around nine months a baby will begin to try and ask for things by using gestures, sounds and body language. At ten months a baby will be begin to reach for an object they want, opening and closing their hands and making whinning noises, until the adult gives them the object they want. At about the same age, babies begin to play gestural games with their parents, such as ‘patty cake’ or ‘wave goodbye’.
Receptive language, understanding the meaning of words spoken, begins to develop around nine or ten months. Children generally understand before they can speak, understanding about 30 words by this age. They begin to understand simple instructions and would generally understand the meaning of ‘no’ and respond to their own name. All these bits of information seem to come together at around 10 months in a series of changes: the beginning of meaningful gestures, the drift of babbling towards heard language sounds, the first participation in imitative gestural games, and the first comprehension of individual words. The child is beginning to understand a little about the process of communication and has the desire and intention to communicating with the world.

12-18 months
By 12 months a child has about one to three words, mostly nouns. Often a child’s first words are used in only one or two specific situation and in the presence of many cues. For example a child might say ‘car’ in response to an adult prompting ‘what’s that?’. This early word learning is very slow and a child may need to repeat these words a number of times. Between 12 and 18 months a child may only learn to say around 30 words.
16- 24 months

At about 16 to 24 months children begin to add new words very rapidly, as if they have figured out things have names. At around 18 months a child has about 50 words. By age 24 months the child has acquired about 320 words. This is referred to as the naming explosion. However it is not a steady gradual process. A vocabulary burst begins once the child has 50 words.
During this first early vocabulary burst the majority of new words are names for things or people. Verbs tend to develop later. They may be harder for children to acquire as they label relationships between objects rather than just individual objects. Some studies suggest that it maybe due to the fact that parents emphasise nouns more than verbs in speaking and reading to infants.

Which sounds are developed first?

Which step of phonological development comes first?

Which vowels develop first?

Which of the following sounds is usually acquired first by a child?