Labial

The term “labial” pertains to the lips, which are crucial components in the construction of certain phonetic sounds of speech. Through the developmental lens, the movement of the lips is one of the first achieved motor functions infants perform in the attempt to reveal primitive verbal communication. For psychologists and speech pathologists, the importance of recognizing the articulatory functions of the lips is invaluable in evaluating the process of language and speech acquisition, and disorders associated with them. For example, the first sound an infant generally attempts to produce is ‘m’ as in ‘mama’, which involves a closure of the lips and thus is a labial sound.