| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Infants' perception of various stimuli begins immediately after their birth, and they gradually come to understand the effects of these stimuli upon themselves. They come to know that they can satisfy their needs by communicating with people around them. Their voluntary vocalizations are accepted positively and approvingly by people around them, especially by the mother, and they learn to use their vocalizations as a means of communication. It is expected that infants first acquire the acoustic patterns that character ize the sequences of phonetic segments that they hear, rather than the individual segments themselves. Furthermore, child language is not to be considered a proper subpart of adult language, but rather a self-sufficient system of rules which allows infants to make themselves understood. The present study has shown that the acquisition of acoustic aspects of communication is related to the fulfillment of their needs in the following respects. (1) Characteristics of early u
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tterances. Infants' early activities are by and large rooted in their desire to fulfill their needs, and this is true of the very early form of vocal communication that is employed by infants even before they begin to acquire vocabulary and/or grammar. (2) Intention of early utterances and intonation : Even in the early stages, the intonation patterns of utterances are correlated with their contextual properties, and this correlation is acquired systematically through interactionwith the mother. (3) Imitation and response in language acquisition. Acquisition of language is accelerated by the interaction with themother. Infants' early utterances can be classified into voluntary utterances that express their needs or are purely descriptive, total or partial repetitions of the utterances of others, utterances with which to respond to the utterances by others, and others, like soliloquy, that do not seem to fit into any of the categories mentioned. The acquisition begins with imitation, and the voluntary utterances emerge after the stage on which various irregularly uttered responses converge on certain well-defined types that meet the child's communicative purposes. Less
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