Scouse Baby's Babbling Shows Presence of Accents before Speech Development
-500.png)
A recent video showing a baby babbling with a Scouse accent has gone viral!
Baby Orla, not yet able to speak, was caught arguing in what sounds like a made-up language with a strong Scouse accent. Besides how adorable this interaction is, the video shows how babies mimic their caregivers’ speech and behaviours to develop language. In this case, the accent and speech patterns have developed before actual speech and words!
When listening to the baby babbling, it is easy to recognise phonetic characteristics typical of the Scouse dialect. Linguists highlight the importance of social and environmental factors in language and speech development.
In 2009, Prof. Kathleen Wermke, an expert in speech development at Würzburg University in Germany, compared different babies' cries. Some of the findings showed consistent differences in tone and melody in babies' cries from different language exposure, including German, Mandarin, and Swedish. The scholar highlighted how babies “learn the musical features of the surrounding languages. The music is always first; it’s like a scaffold for the words”.
This study challenges the previous assumption that babies' early vocalisations are universal, like when they learn how to say primary sounds and syllables such as “ma.” It suggests that exposure to local speech patterns can influence babies' babbling, indicating the presence of accents from an early age even before speech develops.
RSS