User:Kirstyboniface/sandbox

Phonemic expansion

Phonemic expansion is when a baby's capacity to produce sound becomes more complex and varied. This usually occurs when the baby is 6-9 months. . As the voice box develops a greater diversity of sounds appear. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a Phoneme is a unit of sound in a language that cannot be analysed into smaller units. The baby will hear sounds that they may here on a daily basis and begin to repeat these sounds such as consonants or vowels by exploring their voice box.

There are around 20 vowels and 24 consonants of a spoken dialect of a language, with a lot of consonants and vowels a baby has much to explore. Phonemic expansion occurs in the holophrastic stage, usually utterances occur such as "gaga" and "dada" as you can see they are not actual words just repeated sounds. These sounds from Phonemic expansion can be used to attract attention from their parents. This links to the behaviourism idea as the baby can gain things and earn rewards from their parents. At this point the baby cannot create any grammatical structures or sentences they can only produce sounds. The sounds tend to be sounds they hear around them so the baby aims to produce them. As the baby develops, they begin to learn more grammatical structures and associate things that they see. Phonemic expansion is one of the first stages so that the baby has the ability to produce sounds.

References