Imitation in Speech Development : a Literature Overview

Speech development in young children has been studied quite often in a linsi:uistic (mainly phonological) way, with respect to the production and perception ability of infants and young children (Menyuk:,1971;Locke,1983;Ferguson,1986;Jusczyk,1986). Development of children's speech and their acoustic-phonetic correlates, however, are still considered as an area of research in which many aspects have to be elicited. The early stages in the development of speech movements, often called the prelingual period, have been explored, among others, by Koopmans-van Beinum & Van der Stelt (1986). Based on the source-filter model of speech production, they describe speech movements using the respiration cycle as segmentation unit: