(1)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais,
UFMG, Belo Horizonte, MG.
(2)
Faculdade de Medicina da UFMG, Belo
Horizonte, MG, Brasil.
(3)
Pontifícia Universidade Católica/SP, São
Paulo, SP, Brasil.
(4)
Departamento de Fonoaudiologia da
Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG, Belo
Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brasil.
(5)
Hospital Infantil João Paulo II (Fundação
Hospitalar do Estado de Minas Gerais),
Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil.
Conict of interest: non-existent
Strategies for perception of mother tongue:
from born to one year old
Estratégias de percepção da língua materna:
do nascimento até um ano de vida
Patrícia Reis Ferreira
(1)
Aline Moreira Lucena
(1)
Nárli Machado-Nascimento
(2)
Renato Oliveira Alves
(1)
Vera Cristina Alexandre de Souza
(3)
Sirley Alves da Silva Carvalho
(4)
Walter Camargos Jr.
(5)
Erika Maria Parlato-Oliveira
(2)
Received on: December 30, 2015
Accepted on: May 18, 2016
Mailing address:
Patrícia Reis Ferreira
Av. Brasil, 1701, sl 205 Bairro Funcionários
Belo Horizonte – MG – Brasil
CEP: 30140-002
E-mail: patriciareisf@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Very young babies show very rened language skills being able to perceive many features in adult speech.
The perception of the mother tongue is essential to language acquisition. This literature review deals with
speech perception skills from children under one year of age. Therefore a literature search was performed
in 7 databases, in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, in the period of 2003-2014. With this biblio-
graphic research was possible to recognize how language acquisition occurs quickly, and that very young
infants are able to use elaborate strategies to initiate such acquisition.
Keywords: Child Development; Infant; Cognition; Speech Perception
RESUMO
Bebês muito jovens demonstram habilidades linguísticas bastante renadas, sendo capazes de perceber
várias características na fala do adulto. A percepção da língua materna é, pois, imprescindível para a
aquisição da linguagem. Esta revisão de literatura trata das habilidades de percepção de fala dos bebês
a partir do nascimento até um ano de idade. Para tanto, foi realizada a busca bibliográca em 7 bases de
dados, nos idiomas inglês, francês, português e espanhol, no período de 2007 a 2014. Com esse levan-
tamento bibliográco foi possível reconhecer como a aquisição da linguagem ocorre de forma rápida e
que bebês bem jovens são capazes de utilizar estratégias elaboradas para iniciar tal aquisição.
Descritores: Desenvolvimento Infantil; Lactente; Cognição; Percepção da Fala
Revision articles
Rev. CEFAC. 2016 Jul-Ago; 18(4):982-991 doi: 10.1590/1982-0216201618422715
Rev. CEFAC. 2016 Jul-Ago; 18(4):982-991
Babies’ perception of mother tongue |
983
INTRODUCTION
Recent studies demonstrate that, from a very early
age, babies already show very rened linguistics
abilities being able to many features in adult speech.
Human newborn babies can discriminate phonetic
contrasts and extract rhythm, prosodic information and
elementary regularities of the utterance, which it is an
essential perception for language acquisition.
By knowing better this acquisition process, the
professional which works with children with difculties
to comprehend and acquire the language will be able to
intervene precisely and effectively based on strategies
which are observed in babies with typical development.
The objective of this article is present a review of the
literature of the last 7 years, in English, French, Spanish,
and Portuguese on perception of babies speech, since
born up to their rst year of life. During this period it is
possible to observe an acquisition of motor, hearing
and speaking skills; which will be essential to develop
the language since it is from their perception of adult
speech that babies develop skills to produce their own
speech.
METHODS
In order to carry out this bibliographic review on
the current research relative to language acquisition
by babies until their rst year of life, a database search
was conducted in the following: MEDLINE/PubMed,
Web of Science, Psycinfo, Embase, Scopus, Biblioteca
Cochrane, BVS – LILACS, BDENF, INDEXPSI psico-
logia, Index Psi teses, IBECS.
The search was in English, French, Portuguese, and
Spanish and it was conducted in the period from 2007
to 2014.
The authors used to create the search strat-
egies were “Hearing”, “Auditory Perception/physi-
ology”, “Auditory Perception”, “Acoustic Stimulation”
“Auditory Stimulation” “Language Development”,
“Language” “Child Development”, “Child Language”,
“Sign Language”, “Infant Development”, “Pattern
Recognition, Physiological”, “Pattern Recognition,
Visual”, “Recognition”, “Pattern Discrimination”
“Familiarity”, “Infant” “Cognitive Process”, “Learning”,
“Speech Development”, “lactente”, “Recognição
(Psicologia)”, “Reconhecimento Fisiológico de
Modelo”, “Reconhecimento Visual de Modelos”,
“Reconocimiento Visual de Modelos”, “Patrones
de Reconocimiento Fisiológico”, “reconocimiento”,
“reconhecimento”, “familiaridade”.
There have been found 4267 articles by these
authors. The summary overviews of these articles were
consulted so as to rule out those ones related to pathol-
ogies and group at risk, for this present article is about
the ordinary development of babies. The articles on
prematurity, lower birth weight, hearing loss, cochlear
implant, deafness, sign language, visual maturation,
otitis, and cleft palate problems were excluded. After
this pre-selection, 302 articles remained. Out of these,
56 could be found in more than one database. And after
ruling out the duplicated, a total of 262 articles were
remaining. Picture 1 depicts the number of articles that
have been found in the respective databases and the
remaining number after the rst selection.
Ferreira PR, Lucena AM, Machado-Nascimento N, Alves RO, Souza VCA, Carvalho SAS,
Camargos Jr. W, Parlato-Oliveira EM
Babies’ perception of mother tongue
Database Search result Result after rst selection
MEDLINE/ PubMed 2198 174
Web of Science 756 11
PsycINFO 752 9
EMBASE 342 37
SCOPUS 63 29
Biblioteca Cochrane/Library Cochrane 71 1
BVS – LILACS, BDENF, INDEXPSI psicologia, Index Psi teses, IBECS 176 1
Total 4262 262
Picture 1. Number of articles per studied database, and the remaining number after rst selection
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| Ferreira PR, Lucena AM, Machado-Nascimento N, Alves RO, Souza VCA, Carvalho SAS, Camargos Jr. W, Parlato-Oliveira EM
After this pre-selection, the articles were examined
again so that only the ones specically related to the
thesis would be included. Moreover, at this stage, the
articles which had research on babies above age of 1
year were rejected, for they were out of the age-group
predetermined, thus the search ends up with 39 articles.
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
The ontogeny of the linguistic functions of human
brain remains uncertain and though some hearing
abilities may be outlined during pregnancy, if and how
such immature cortical circuits can process the speech
is still under discussion¹.
It is possible to notice a great neural activity in the
right frontal area, which can be stimulated by changes
in syllables and alteration in the speaker’s voice¹. This
area also offers support to recognize the sequence
of voices since the earliest stages of language
acquisition².
Besides the frontal area, it is also possible to
notice an activity in the front-temporal region of
the left hemisphere as a result of linguistic hearing
stimulus¹,³. Newborns show a gradual tendency
to temporal processing from the early days and
enhance this response over time with increase in age.
At 22 days of chronological age, one can observe a
successful processing
4
and at 4 months of age, there
is an activation of the left hemisphere during the rapid
frequency change of the speech
5
. This neural activation
made researchers conclude that human babies are
born with superiority in their left hemisphere so that
they can process specic properties of the utterance.
According to other study, the prenatal experience
with the mother tongue affects the way the newborn’s
brain respond to language all over their cerebral regions
responsive to the speech processing
6
, especially those
areas related to memorization ability
7
.
The human brain is, therefore, committed to the
properties of mother tongue. This fact explains this
usual interest in the change of the development in
the rst year of life. Very young babies show skills to
discriminate phonetic contrasts in both mother tongue
and other languages. However, after a few months,
most of the sounds that do not belong to their mother
tongue cease to be recognized by the children,
because they become very unintelligible for the
children to recognize them. Studies have shown that
throughout second semester of life, babies lose their
skills relative to non-native sounds and they polish their
sensibility to particular sounds of their mother tongue
8,9
,
and these neural representations are not substituted
10
;
what makes a perceptual linguistic rearrange, implying
that the perceptive system could be more and more
strongly agree with the audiovisual correlations of
mother tongue
8
.
It can be notice that the brain reacts to the diverse
linguistic stimuli more and more mature as time goes
by. The same reactions happen to voice recognition.
Studies carried out on babies in gestational stages,
using MRI scan
11
and checking their heart rate
12
,
veried selective cortical processing what indicates
the formation of neural network in the third quarter of
pregnancy. These studies imply that babies prove to
be able to recognize their mother’s voice from an early
age, and this fact can indicate that, therefore, there is
learning as far back as the uterine life. In addition, it is
unquestionable the caregiver’s role in a baby’s devel-
opment considering that, according to search remarked
herein, the caregiver’s voice is processed differently
by human brain, attracting the baby’s attention and
making it easier the interaction between the baby and
the adult.
However, in order to comprehend the language
to which human beings are exposed as far back as
prenatal period, it is not enough to recognize voices or
discriminate phonemes alone. There are still two great
challenges that should be overcome precociously in
order to make it possible to recognize a word. Infant
needs to exceed the high degree of acoustical irrel-
evant variability in the utterance such as voice tone,
diverse intonation, inter alia, and to reach the set of
relevant lexical representations
13
. Besides, babies
must be able to segment adult speech. According to
Saussure
14
, language is composed of elements that
occur one after another linearly, namely “in the speech
chain” (p. 142), what requires from a child the ability to
segment the ow of speech they hear because adults
usually address to children by means of sentences. It
is, therefore, necessary to understand the limits of the
words in a sentence so that, little by little, one may learn
their meaning.
Researchers have observed that ten-month children
were able to segment words in a continuous speech
utterance; they also could understand more words in
the twelfth month, and produced more by the twenty-
fourth month compared to those ten-month children
that had not shown any response to segmentation
15
.
Other specialists could also observe such data by doing
research into seven-month babies, and afterwards into
twenty-four-month babies
16
. These data show how
Rev. CEFAC. 2016 Jul-Ago; 18(4):982-991
Babies’ perception of mother tongue |
985
Researchers could also observe that the segmen-
tation may be inuenced by phonotactic knowledge
25
.
Phonotactic patterns of the language involves the
possible or non-possible combinations in the language,
so when a child realizes that in their mother tongue
there may not be, for instance, the sound /r/ as in
“barata” at the beginning of a word, this serves as
evidence for not segmenting the ow of the utterance in
the middle of that word, facilitating the segmentation of
the sentence appropriately.
Monitoring the prosody is another aspect that helps
in the segmentation of utterances. The modulation
of the adult speech while addressed to a child helps
signicantly the infant to perceive the utterance
26,27
.
When an adult use the child-directed speech, namely
motherese, they overdo the intonation intuitively, use
short clauses, reduce the speed rate, simplify the
sentences, vary their pitch more often, and broaden the
range of the prosody. These characteristics in speaking
draw the child’s attention, which makes it easier to
perceive mother tongue from early years of life contrib-
uting, therefore, to the language appropriation.
One of the characteristics of motherese is the use of
short clauses separated by pauses, and it has conse-
quently more pauses than the adult-directed speech;
therefore, it can help segmentation. It has been veried
that 7,5-month-olds have a facility for recognizing
words from the segmentation of the utterance since
these words are located at the beginning or at the end
of the sentence next to its pause
28
.
In addition to this facility for segmentation, the child-
directed speech with intonation favors bonds between
babies and family members, and introduces the
newcomer into an important social circle to the babies’
development. Several studies have been carried out and
all of them agree that motherese provides, very preco-
ciously, either newborns or some month of life babies
with neural activation
29
. Research has found activation
of frontal brain area as a response to motherese
30,31
.
These observations indicate that motherese inuences
the cerebral functions of the babies, increasing the
activities in these regions, drawing attention to poten-
tially signicant words.
Researchers have still been studying the support
of the phonological sentences in the segmentation of
spoken words. Phonological sentences are made of
one or more content words, comprise four to seven
syllables, are characterized by elongated pitch before
the edge and a specic melodic group
32
. It is observed
that the phrasal prosody can allow children to retrieve
essential the segmentation abilities are in order to
acquire the language, and they are truly associated
with lexical development later on.
However, in order to enable the segmentation,
babies must observe the acoustic track streams
available being successful in the appropriation of
language. There are several factors that can help in
the segmentation conducted by babies. Initially they
use many strategies all at once, but as the babies
grow older, the way they segment also matures and
the babies become able to comprehend specic audio
signals, demanding less number of means to make the
segmentation easier
17,18
. Another important point is that
according to their own linguistic experiences, babies
can use different strategies to segment. A particular
strategy can offer the child a clue to discover another
way to segment, which benets the apprentice in this
task.
Some factors that can help babies carry out the
segmentation of the utterance will be described hence-
forth. It can be listed, among others, being familiar with
the word. For 7,5-month-old babies, the knowledge of
a particular word has facilitated the segmentation of
the utterance, however, in later date sentences, by the
10,5 months, children did not need to know words in
order to do such task
19
. It was possible to verify that
10-month-olds show highly efcient linguistic skills to
segment, and recognize spoken words; which allows
them to face deftly the creation of a lexicon. This
familiarity contributes yet to the children’s overleaping
phonetically similar words and their recognizing and
segmenting the words with similar sounds in a uent
utterance
20
.
And besides this familiarity, statistical standards
have also been great predictors of segmentation. The
child observes that some sounds of the language occur
more frequently in a particular position of the word
(beginning, middle, or end), and uses this information
to segment utterances. There must be, however, recog-
nition of isolated words in order to learn the statistical
properties of the language and thus isolated words
that were previously mastered support the child in
the segmentation of new words as they appear in the
discourse
21
. The responsibility of the brain with these
patterns which are experienced at early age helps the
acquisition of lexicon
22
. Studies on 11-month-olds
23
and
7 to 9-month-olds
24
have shown that these babies have
an ability to use statistical information to extract words
from the utterance.
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| Ferreira PR, Lucena AM, Machado-Nascimento N, Alves RO, Souza VCA, Carvalho SAS, Camargos Jr. W, Parlato-Oliveira EM
recognize and sketch words out, and all these three
processes are crucial for the construction of vocab-
ulary
38
. Furthermore, 12-month-olds prefer words to
other linguistic stimuli, which implies that by this age
they have already developed knowledge of the nature
in the form of sounds to name objects properly, and
these babies will favor that form rather than the others
39
.
It is thus observed that babies develop skills to
perceive the speech, using many strategies and
following a laborious pathway to the real recognition of
the word. However, as the brain is extremely involved
with this process, the task of appropriation of mother
tongue is overcome in relatively short period of time.
From the selected articles, it is possible to observe
that this thesis is considerably recent to which only in
the last few years some researchers have given proper
relevance. It can be determined from this research
that there have been an increase in the production of
articles over time, and an increase in the number of
published works related to this thesis since 2011. This
subject is undoubtedly signicant especially because
it focus on knowledge of, both babies’ perception of
the speech and cereal responses, natural acquisition
of mother tongue, which is target of interest of several
areas of knowledge. This competence is indispensible
for intervention in potential language disorders. Picture
2 depicts the distribution of these surveys over the
period 2007 to 2014.
Picture 3 shows the average number of publishing
on perception of mother tongue up to 1 year old
between the years 2007 and 2014.
some information on the syntactic structure of verbal
utterance, even before having access to a wide
lexicon
33
, making it easier the sentence segmentation.
As children can make segmentation of the adult
speech either by observing the pitch of the language,
locating phonological phrases, recognizing the prosody
or how frequently they occur in the speech, the children
endow the words they hear with meaning. And though
children start to produce words near their rst year
of age, they develop the ability to understand some
months previously, recognizing the meaning of the
most common words in their everyday life. Researchers
have conrmed that there are faster neural pathways to
familiar words
33
.
A very familiar and importantly unquestionable word
for the baby is their name. Studies have shown that 5
to 8-month-old babies are able to recognize their own
names in a signal-to-noise ratio 10dB
34
. Similarly, not
only can 5-month-olds detect their own names, but
they also use them as a social suggestion to direct their
attention to events and objects in the world
35
. A pilot
study has observed even younger children and veried
that 4 to 5-month-old babies can recognize their own
names
36
.
Babies are able to recognize other words between
6 to 9 months of age, demonstrating this ability as they
look towards named images, which indicates they have
understood the words they heard. This fact shows
clearly that even young children can learn common
words through everyday experience with language
37
.
9-month-old babies are able to categorize visually,