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Development in Speech Production

Until the first year of life infants cannot speak they can only produce a reoccurring babbling sound. The repeated babbling and auditory patterns starts the initial production of speech by structuring events of object permanence and location creating a matrix of our first lexical concept.

The first stage of meaningful speech does not occur until around the age of one. This stage is the holophrastic phase. It’s when infant speech consists of only one word (ie. papa).

The next stage is the telegraphic phase. In this stage infants can form short sentences (Ie. Daddy sit, or mommy drink). Infants are now between the ages of one and a half and two and a half years old. This stage is particularly difficult for an infant because of the explosive growth of their lexicons, which hinders the infants ability to keep all the relevant whole word gestures apart. However, they do over come this phase by breaking down the word gestures into phonological segments. At this point in a infants development of speech there lexicon consists of 200 words or more and they are able to understand even more than they can speak. When they reach two and a half years their speech production becomes an increased complex semantic structure. This is important because it is what helps them to express meaning. This is when a infant develops a system of lemmas.

Around the age of four or five the child lemmas have a wide range of diversity, this helps them select the right lemma needed to produce correct speech. Now at this age the child should be able to speak in full complete sentences very similar to how an adult speaks.

Adult’s speech production follows 4 stages.The first is the activation of lexical concepts, and then they select the lemma needed. From there they morphologically and phonologically encode the context of speech. Lastly the word is phonetically encoded and this is how speech production develops.