How Children Learn to Pronounce: Not by Imitation but by Their Mothers’ Vocal Mirroring

It is generally assumed that children learn to pronounce speech sounds by imitation from adult models. This requires that a child creates some form of representation for a speech sound in a single modality, which he uses for both perception and production. It is usually imagined that this underlying representation is auditory/acoustic, but arguments can also be made for motor/gestural alternatives and recent neuroimaging evidence has added strength to the alternative views. But whether auditory or motor, it is supposed that the representation is abstracted from examples of the speech sound that the child hears, and then used to guide his own production of the corresponding speech sound. The debate on the underlying nature of speech representation has (rightly) occupied phonetics for many years. The presumption that speech must be encoded in a single modality is never challenged because learning by direct imitation requires it; but this presumption should be challenged. It is not attested that children learn to pronounce speech sounds by imitation: this has only ever been an assumption. In fact, on closer examination we find good reasons to believe firstly, that children cannot learn the qualities of speech sounds this way; and secondly, that vocal mirroring (as explained below) is a plausible alternative. This implies that the inner representation of a speech sound is both auditory and motor at the same time, thus resolving the longstanding debate on the 'true' nature of speech and explaining some otherwise puzzling adult and developmental data.