Implosive and prenasalized consonant-like sounds in babbling

This paper reports an analysis of the production of implosive and prenasalized sounds by 6 children (3 Fulfulde and 3 Bambara) from the onset of babbling to the end of their first year. It shows that the production of implosive consonant-like sounds by the children is very early on language-specific i.e related to the presence of these consonants in the language the children are exposed to. Unlike the implosive consonant-like production, the prenasalized consonant-like sounds show no language-specific trend. Thus, in this cross-linguistic study on Fulfulde and Bambara children’s babbled utterances, the implosive sounds are markers of early specialization in consonants’ production by children exposed to these two languages.