Reflections on the Roles of Consonants and Vowels in Babyhood Acquisition and Speech Processing

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Consonants; Vowels; Early Acquisition; speech processing; Brain function

Abstract

Consonants and vowels play significant roles in human language systems. The roles they carried and the process they went through arise many researchers’ interest. The present study reviews the research and papers about the laboring system of consonants and vowels in babyhood acquisition and language processing to find out whether consonants and vowels carry for specific works. At the same time, necessary judgment and clarification will be made to explain some experiments. At the end of this paper there found the phenomena: consonants serve more roles in the lexicon and vowels serve more roles in grammatical function. There is subconscious labor that divided consonants and vowels into different working departments according to their characteristics no matter in the early acquisition or language processing. In early acquisition, infants seek help more from consonants to build lexicon while in learning repetitive structure, they would turn to vowels more. The same results also appear in language processing: consonants, with quality distinction, show superiority in the lexicon. By contrast, vowels, with quantity distinction, show superiority in grammar. Other research conducted on brain functioning mechanisms also provides evidence that our brains process vowels and consonants differently. This paper finally concludes that vowels perform more roles in grammar and consonants perform more roles in the lexicon.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiaxing Lin
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/13
TI  - Reflections on the Roles of Consonants and Vowels in Babyhood Acquisition and Speech Processing
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 4th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 40
EP  - 47
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_7
ID  - Lin2023
ER  -