- The emergence of the speech capacity by D. Kimbrough Oller
In this work Oller examines at length the ontogeny of speech, basing his findings on four longitudinal studies he has conducted over the last 30 years; in the last third of the book he posits possible stages of vocal evolution in hominids and takes into account communication among nonhuman primates. O has published a score of articles on language acquisition, and this work is the culmination of long research. [End Page 604]
The book consists of a preface, fifteen chapters, references, and indexes. O uses the infrastructural approach to language acquisition on two levels: The transmission of signals is assignable to infraphonology; the principles that apply to functions or values of vocal actions, to infrasemiotics.
The book is too rich to be adequately covered in a book notice, but its plan may be summarized as follows:
Pertaining to ontogeny: The study of vocal development should not be based on the traditional descriptive approach making use of phonetic transcriptions; this approach needs to be replaced by an infrastructural one, noting the infant’s protophones (quasivowels, gooing [usually referred to as cooing], raspberries, marginal and canonical babbling, and others). Furthermore, the physical quality of the protophones and their usage should be viewed as leading from primitive vocal capabilities to a remarkably flexible vocal tool.
Comparative considerations: The initial aspects of the vocal divergence of humans from nonhuman primates are observable during the first months of life.
Pertaining to phylogeny: ‘The eruption of full-fledged syntax’ probably occurred during the Upper Paleolithic.
O takes on several scholars known for their contributions to language acquisition. For example, he discusses the three ‘myths’ that appear to have originated with Roman Jakobson: that at the height of babbling, infants produce the sounds of all the world’s languages with ease, that there is a discontinuity between babbling and speech, and that infants babble randomly. To Eric H. Lenneberg he attributes the ‘myth’ that deaf and hearing infants babble alike. And when O compares communication of humans and nonhuman primates, he has some reservations concerning Charles F. Hockett’s design-feature approach.
In Ch. 13 (316–38) O speculates on the prehistory of hominid vocal development in terms of seven stages: contact calls produced with normal phonation; elaborated vocalization as a tool of social interaction; free vocalization and functional use of new vocal types; expansion of the triadic reference (I, you, something) with vocal accompaniment and elaborated articulation; well-formed syllabification and arbitrariness; recombination of syllables to expand the vocabulary; and segmented syllables and short sentences.
O’s impressive acquaintance with relevant literature is attested not only by numerous references throughout the text but by a bibliography containing some 600 entries (365–95). The book will be of interest not only to linguists but also to anthropologists, primatologists, and psychologists.