All over the world there are guidelines and milestones that children are ought to reach in the speech-language development at a certain age, however, these milestones relate mostly to the segmental level of speech – voices, syllables, words and longer statements. There are other elements that play an important role in field of speech: rhythm, tempo, melody, pauses and longer statements. These are suprasegmental –prosodic elements of speech. The development of suprasegmental elements of speech is given far more attention abroad than in Slovenian literature, which is why the interest occurred how these elements are developed in Slovene language in a child without any developmental concer.
The aim of this thesis is to analyze how the baby’s ability to imitate suprasegmental elements of speech develops from birth until the baby’s first year of life. The questions set for this research are: when does the baby start to imitate suprasegmental elements, which are the first elements that the child imitates, in what order do these elements occur, and how does their complexity develop. The decision has been made to qualitatively analyze the imitations of suprasegmental elements of speech with a baby girl. The baby girl (my daughter) has been filmed in interaction with her mother (me) since her day of birth to her first year of age. Audio and video footages have been viewed and analyzed later on.
The results have shown that the girl started to imitate suprasegmental elements already in her second month. The first element that occurred was the melody of speech, followed by the volume of speech, the pitch of speech, rhythm and tempo of speech, and the imitation of pauses occurred as last. All listed elements have occurred by the girl’s fifth month and they have only developed and become more complex since her first year of age. The girl started to become more and more competent in imitating her mother’s speech and its prosodic elements.
This work is the first research about imitations of suprasegmental elements of speech in Slovene language in the child’s first year. On the date of March 3rd 2018, there were no similar researches found in the database (Cobiss, DiKUL, Sicris) that included the word combinations of keywords “imitations”, “prosody”, “child”, “mother”, “interaction” and that would be connected to the field of speech and language pathology.
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