Chapter 6 – Essential Linguistic Tools

1. Learning to Speak

Read this account of phoneme acquisition in small children, from an earlier version of Chapter 6: 

The rarer sounds tend to be acquired later than the more common ones; Arab babies do not start with pharyngeal fricatives when they begin to speak. When babies babble, wherever in the world they may be, they tend to make sounds like  /p, b, t, m, d, n, k, ɡ, s, h, w, j/, while for example  /f, v, θ, ð, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ, l, r, ŋ/ are much less frequent. It is no accident that the words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ tend so heavily towards mama, baba, dada and the like: proud parents, convinced that their child is addressing them, reinforce their offspring’s entirely instinctive use of these sounds with praise and encouragement. 

From your own experience and observations, do you agree with this analysis? Would you add anything about the way babies acquire speech sounds in your language, or any other language you are familiar with?