Abstract:
The world’s languages are diverse;however its sound system exhibits underlying commonalities. The phonotactic combinations of consonant and vowel have shown universal tendencies. A preferred pattern was first observed by MacNeilage and Davis (Davis &MacNeilage, 1995; MacNeilage, 1998; MacNeilage& Davis, 1990). Phonological inventories have shown that consonants at three places of articulation (labial, coronal & velar) are nearly universal , as are vowels at three degrees of fronting (front, central, back) (Jackobson, 1968; Lindblom, 1986, Maddieson, 1984,1997). These CV preferences could be the patterns of adult speech into theirbabbling. The influence of ambient language in babbling is known to occur at very early stages of infant speech development (Boysson-Bardies, Halle, Sagart& Durand, 1989; Whalen, Levitt & Wang, 1991).In this context, it is quite essential to investigate the CV preferences suggesting a developmental check in the early prelinguistic period in shaping speech acquisition. The present paper is focused on the appearances of consonant and vowel preferences during the pre linguistic period till the age of 12 months in infants of Hindi and Malayalam monolingual speaking families.The participants comprised of 80 infants, 5 girls and 5 boys each in the age range 4-6months, 6-8months, 8-10months and 10-12months from native Hindi (A IndoEuropean language majorly spokenthroughoutIndia, precisely in Northern India) and Malayalam (A Dravidian language spoken in Southwest of India) speaking families. Audio recording of the babbling utterances were carried out to obtain a minimum of hundred utterances from each infant.Thedata was analysed using IPA to obtainthe frequency and type of consonant-vowel utterances. The CV preferences were classified into 9 preferred combinations. Frequency of occurrence of CV combinations varied across age ranges, however increased in the higher age group of 10 to 12 months in both the language groups.