第二十屆 腦性麻痺高風險嬰兒與正常發展嬰兒之典型喃語出現比例分析 Differences of canonical babbling ratio in infants with high-risk of CP and typically developing infants

腦性麻痺高風險嬰兒與正常發展嬰兒之典型喃語出現比例分析

Differences of canonical babbling ratio in infants with high-risk of CP and typically developing infants

洪羿安^1*、陳芊孜¹、鄭靜怡²、藍鼎³、陳麗美⁴

Yi-An Hong^1*, Chien-Tzu Chen¹, Ching-Yi Cheng², Ting Lan³, Li-Mei Chen⁴

¹國立成功大學外文系（所）大學生、²國立成功大學醫院復健科職能治療師、³國立成功大學醫院復健科物理治療師、⁴國立成功大學外文系（所）教授

¹Undergraduate student, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University,²Occupational Therapist, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, National Cheng Kung University Hospital,³Physical Therapist, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, National Cheng Kung University Hospital,⁴Professor, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University

Background and purpose: Cerebral palsy (CP) is associated with a range of language difficulties. However, detecting the disorder at an early stage is still a challenge nowadays. Recent studies show that late onset of canonical babbling could be a predictor to some language-related disorders. Canonical babbling is characterized by the utterances with consonant-vowel structure, e.g, [ba], [da], [mama], [papapa]. The numbers of canonical syllables are divided by the total utterances to get the canonical babbling ratio (CBR). The aim of this study was to verify the possibility of detecting high-risk of CP through calculating CBR by: 1) categorizing vocalizations of infants with high-risk of CP and typically developing (TD) infants into different types and transcribing their vocalizations between 12 and 19 months of age into phonetic symbols; 2) calculating the CBR between 12 and 19 months of age.

Methods: A total of 10 infants with high-risk of CP and 3 TD infants participated in the study. The sound recordings of each infant were transcribed with phonetic symbols according to the worldbet system (Hieronymus, 1994).
Results: Major findings in this study were: 1) Infants with CP had delayed and poor pre-linguistic development and showed lower CBRs; 2) The pre-linguistic development of TD infants was similar to each other with CBRs of around 0.52 and 0.76 at 12 and 19 months of age respectively.

Conclusions: CBRs at 12 to 19 months, including onset of canonical babbling and CBR, function as an acceptable predictor of high risk of language delay or disorders, such as CP.

Keywords: canonical babbling, cerebral palsy, pre-linguistic vocalization, canonical babbling ratio