Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Advisor(s)
Rory A. DePaolis
Abstract
Although babbling is both prevalent and important in the process of language development, it could be argued that we still do not understand the basic nature of babbling. To further our understanding of the nature of babbling we attempted to find evidence for brain lateralization typical of adult speech acts during early babbling. This study examined infant mouth asymmetries during babbling sequences in search of evidence that babbling is an inherently linguistic act as indicated by the lateralization of the brain. Previously recorded videos of 12 infants, all 9 months of age, were examined, 29 images were captured, and a reliable and objective method of measuring the mouth for asymmetry was created and implemented in this study. The results were not statistically significant and did not provide sufficient evidence to support the theory that the brain had lateralized for speech.
Recommended Citation
Breazile, Cecilia, "Mouth asymmetries during infant babbling: A brain lateralization study" (2015). Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019. 72.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019/72
