Abstract
Our working hypothesis is based on the idea that there is a “developmental rendez-vous” between what we call the “Sign Frame” and what we call the “Speech Frame”. While the Speech Frame is established in the form of the canonical babbling around the age of 7 months, the Sign Frame appears first of all in the form of imperative pointing around the age of 9 months, before giving place to the so-called declarative pointing. Declarative pointing appears along with the first words, while the Speech Frame allows the child at that stage to coproduce (coarticulate) a vowel and a consonant (Sussman et al., 1999). The relative importance of the elements of this developmental “rendez-vous” at the time of the emergence of the first words remains to be explored. In the present contribution, we would like to study the existence of a harmonic relationship between the Speech Frame and the Sign Frame. To this end, we studied the distribution of the babbling frequencies, and of the durations of the pointing or “stroke” gestures. Our results for these six children, followed during 12 months, show that with a babbling mode at 3 Hz and “strokes” gestures at 600-700 ms (1.5 Hz), we can account for the first words template. Thus, with these “prosodic words” that can vary from one to two syllables, it is necessary to call upon the foot as a metric control unit rooted in pointing. This will account for the current observations in the literature provided that instead of counting only syllables/words, one measures the mandible cycles control embedded in pointing “strokes”.