Identification of Phoneme Inventory in Babbling by Malayalam Native Infants

At the same time infant’s speech perception is developing, the speech production also starts over first twelve months. Infant’s first vocalizations are ‘wild sounds’. Reflexive and vegetative sounds also appear in the first six weeks, ‘Cooing’ around six weeks, ‘Babbling’ around seven months. An early period of ‘marginal babbling’ then develops to ‘canonical babbling’ and then ‘variegated babbling’ around ten to fourteen months followed by first word around twelve months. These stages are universal and continuous. The data is a naturalistic speech data collected directly from child. The study was carried out by maintaining the proper recording using high quality recorder. The child normally got the complete environmental support and he has normal capacity to acquire language. The study aims at identifying the phonemes based on the production level of the infants in Malayalam language acquisition.