A phonetic and acoustic study on the early speech development of two Italian children

In this paper, the phonetic aspects of babbling and early words are investigated through auditory and acoustic analysis. Two children were recorded at 10, 12, 14, 16 months of age during play situations in the presence of their mothers. Every occurrences of babbling episodes and early words suitable for acoustic analysis were classified for consonantal and vocalic categories according to IPA symbols. Acoustic analysis was then performed on the vowels to describe their F1 and F2 values. The acoustic values of the vowels were compared longitudinally with the available data for a representative sample of 7-years-old Italian children and adults (males and females)