Nasalization of vowels in nasal environments in babbling: evidence for frame dominance

An emerging concept for the characterization of the form of babbling and early speech is 'frame dominance': most of the variance arises from a frame provided by open-close mandibular oscillation. In contrast, the tongue - the most versatile articulator in adults - plays only a minor role in intersegmental and even intersyllabic changes. The contribution of another articulator - the soft palate - to time-domain changes in babbling was evaluated in an acoustic analysis of 433 consonant-vowel-consonant sequences produced by 3 infants. Strong nasal effects on vowels in symmetrical consonantal environment were observed in the form of a lower frequency first formant region in low vowels and a lower frequency second formant region in front vowels. These results, the first of which also occurs in adults, were complemented by perceptual tendencies for transcribers to transcribe more mid vowels relative to low vowels and more central vowels relative to front vowels in nasal environments. Thus the soft palate is like the tongue in making only minor contributions to time-domain changes in babbling, and this is considered to be additional evidence for the frame dominance conception.