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Prosodic Primitives in Vocalizations of Infants with Different Mother Tongues

Prosodic Primitives in Vocalizations of Infants with Different Mother Tongues Speaker: Prof. Kathleen Wermke (Center for Pre-Speech Development & Developmental Disorders, Bavarian Julius-Maximilians-University, Würzburg, Germany) Overview: The eyes are the windows of human mind to perceive and process the information in the visual world. Prosodic features such as melody, intensity, and rhythm are essential for an infant acquiring language. There is compelling evidence that infants are sensitive to melodic features of their native language long before speech-like babbling sounds are uttered or first words are produced. Early vocal development is characterized by a universal, unidirected sequence of so-called “vocal stages”, from crying via cooing, marginal and canonical babbling to word and sentence production. Cultural factors, like the ambient language, are known to modify acoustic properties