How long did it take you to start seeing the Star as something of a research project?
Four and a half months.
Which is how long it was before he jerked you from the edge of sleep into fully awake one morning by lying in his cot and burbling ‘Dada’. And ‘Dadee’.
Oh perfidious Star.
Although it wasn’t the actual words that caught your attention, but that he had produced the ‘d’ sound for the first time in response to the fact that your Mother in Law had been chanting ‘Die die die’ at him pretty constantly since she had arrived a few days earlier.
Because it means ‘Give me’ in Russian, yeah?
Previous to this, you hadn’t considered that you could actually influence the Star in his acquisition of baby talk.
Now, however, you were inspired to have a shifty as the International Phonemic Chart to see which sounds you could get him to say next.
The IPA is a way to describe all sounds that exist in all languages. You can see the (Southern) British subset here.
But the full pulmonic* consonant chart is below and there we can clearly see which sounds are going to be closest together in terms of where they are made in the mouth.
So far, the Star can do ‘g’, which he’s been gurgling for a while, and now ‘d’. Which should more properly be rendered /g/ and /d/ to show the sound rather than the letter but… oh, gosh, just follow the link above, or, if anyone fancies seeing how /G/ is different to /g/, then look at this one.
So you are putting your money on his next utterances sounding like /k/ or /t/. With an outside bet on /b/ since so far he has been working his way from right to left along the plosive** line.
And you’ll accept any little flutters anyone else wants to have too, although bear in mind that you reserve the right to chant ‘toast’ at the Star for three days straight in order to influence the outcome.
Update: you have found the versions of the chart for English and Russian now, so here they are…
…for English (from here):
…and for Russian (from here):
Although frankly, this article on Wikipedia makes you want to run away screaming from the whole topic.
*No, you don’t know what that means either.
**You do know what this means, however. Ditto ‘bilabial’, ‘fricative’ and ‘tap’. Jargon’s a wonderful thing.
My mother-in-law loves to tell the story of how I was worried when L, at 9 months, still hadn’t produced a consonant. Research project indeed! Language acquisition is a fabulous thing, and your Star is clearly brilliant.
I must admit I was a bit bermused when I started poking around and found people saying things like ‘…and ‘babbling’ should start at around 9 months…’.
Still, we got hauled back to the doctor’s because his neck wasn’t behaving properly at the six week check, so…
I’ve just found the variations of the IPA for Russian and English, so I think I’m going to add those to the post now…
Well, I now feel happily intimidated and geeked out by baby talk. Who knew it was so beautifully clever and had lovely charts? Do you suppose they text charts to each other so they can all keep on track? I wouldn’t put it past them.
The charts aren’t to do with babies. We use them in language teaching to try to show our beleagured students how English is actually said.
But since they are based on where you make the sound in your mouth, I thought they might be useful to predict what sound the Star might make next.
I’m pretty sure babies email each other the development targets though.
[...] a suspicion it might be in the talking department. On other verbal matters I was very interested to read about the order that children learn sounds recently, and may have a further look into that for interests sake. In the meantime I am [...]
[...] are also happy to reveal that his next consonant, for those indulging in the Star Sound Sweepstake was, in fact, /b/ almost as predicted, and, oh happy day, he looks as though he might be about to [...]