Babbling In The Manual Mode: Argumentative Analysis

One hypothesis of what drives babbling behavior is given in the Petitto article; Babbling in the Manual Mode: Evidence for the Ontogeny of Language. The hypothesis is babbling is not caused by the vocal tract maturing, but that babbling is an “expression of an amodal, brain-based language capacity that is linked to an expressive capacity capable of processing speech and sign” (Pettito 1495). In other words, babbling occurs because language is learned and vocal and manual forms of babbling are the expressive results of learning the spoken or signed language. Evidence that supports this hypothesis is given in an experiment described in the article. Two deaf and three hearing infants were tested at 10, 12, and 14 months. All acoustic sounds were transcribe, as well as all manual activity. The results demonstrated that all of the infants made gesture with their hands, but only the deaf infants were making gestures that resembled manual babbling. This means …show more content…
This is because the child assumes that because you didn’t say ‘car’ or ‘ball’, things they already know, then it must be the things they do not know. The whole-object assumption is another reason a child might map the novel label to the unfamiliar object. This is because children assume words are referring to the entire object instead of parts of the object. So the novel label cannot be the color of the ball or a part of the car, but the new object (Hoff 155, 156).
One reason most developmental scientists would be hesitant to agree with Joan is that baby Erin is only 6.5 months, and is most likely in the reduplicated babbling stage. Erin is repeating “mamama” and this is probably not to communicate with Joan (Hoff 117). One necessary feature of Erin’s utterance in order for it to be her first real word is that it has to be an approximation of a word in the target language, instead of a sting of syllables like Erin’s (Hoff