Download or read book Motor Aspects of the Emergence of Oral Gestures for Speech written by Hermien Dina Diepstra and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emergence approaches to speech acquisition consider speech development as a dynamic process in which the body's actions play a crucial role in the acquisition of phonological knowledge. This assumption is rooted in the hypothesis that the phylogenetic origin of speech lies in oral behaviors for feeding (e.g., smacking, chewing, and sucking). This dissertation investigates motor aspects of emergent speech from a dynamic systems approach in real-time, developmental time and across motor systems. Specifically, it examines contrasting predictions from Articulatory Phonology and Frame-then-Content theory regarding articulator control in early babbling. Infants aged 6 and 8 months were presented with an audiovisual presentation of an adult model producing lip smacks and tongue smacks. The 8-month-old infants exhibited more lip gestures than tongue gestures following adult lip smacks and more tongue gestures than lip gestures following adult tongue-tip smacks. This finding implies that 8-month-old infants are capable of producing goal-directed oral gestures by matching the articulatory organ of an adult model, which is consistent with predictions from Articulatory Phonology. The 6-month-old infants provided no evidence of significant differential responding. Instead, they showed bouts of complex oral movements involving lips and tongue, which resembled ingestive behaviors. This developmental pattern seems homologous with the development of lip smacking in monkeys, supporting the contention that speech developed from rhythmic facial expressions in phylogeny. Besides oral responses, the infants also showed manual responses to the oral gesture presentations. Compared to a baseline condition, infants increased their rate of rhythmic oral and manual (hand and arm) movements during the presentation of rhythmic oral gestures, with older infants exhibiting a higher rate of rhythmic movement events than younger infants. The findings strengthen claims of linkage between the motor systems underlying rhythmic oral and manual behavior in infancy. Overall, the results contribute to the advancement of theory on speech production and offer new directions for the investigation of precursors of speech.