Babbling

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Babbling is a stage in child language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with making the sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words. Babbling begins around 5 to 7 months of age, when a baby's noises begin to sound like phonemes. Infants begin to produce recognizable words usually around 12 months, though babbling may continue for some time after this.

Human babies engage in babble as a sort of vocal play that does not occur in any other mammal species. Terrence W. Deacon infers that human infants don't even need to be particularly excited or even upset to babble because the fact is that human babies will babble spontaneously and incessantly only when emotionally calm. Deacon adds, "It is the first sign that human vocal motor output is at least partially under the control of the cortical motor system because babbling is basically vocal mimickry that happens in correspondence to the maturation of the cortical motor output pathways in the human brain."

Steven Pinker compares a child babbling to a person fiddling with a complex hi-fi system in an attempt to understand what all the controls do. Most babbling consists of a small number of sounds, which suggests the child is preparing the sounds it will need to speak the language it is exposed to.

Infants who are deaf also show vocal babbling, suggesting that early babbling arises from inherent human tendencies to use the vocable articulators in particular ways during early language acquisition. If they are exposed to sign language, they babble with their hands at approximately the same time that vocal babbling appears, although sign production appears a few months earlier than word production does in hearing children.

At what ages do children begin their journey into the world of language by babbling? At 0-4 months babies gurgle, and coo (vowel sounds such as "oooh" and "aah"). And at 4-6 months babies may start to babble (adding consonants: "gaga," "dada"). Then comes 6-12 months where babies babble and enjoy vocal play as they experiment with a range of sounds. At 12-18 months is when toddlers begin to use sound in a meaningful way. They say one-syllable words, make sounds like cars and planes, and say things like, "uh oh." Toddlers also understand the meaning of some words they cannot yet say. They may also use one word to represent a whole sentence. For example, "Juice" may mean, "Mother, I would like some juice;" "You are drinking juice;" or "Look, there is juice in the cup." By the time they've reached 18-24 months toddlers repeat words and are able to link words into short sentences. They know about 50 words, but can understand many more. They may use short sentences, such as, "She go bye bye." And "What you doing?" They may also use familiar words the wrong way. For example, a child with a dog for a pet may look at other large furry animals and say "doggie". And this is just one tiny fraction of how the language phenomenon develops: it's no wonder we are fascinated by the sights and sounds of newborn babies.

Babbling occurs during the first year of life if the child is developing normally. As the baby grows and changes, his/her vocalizations change as well. Babies use these vocalizations to communicate. They start out crying, progress to loud yelling noises, and finally they make speech.

According to Menn and Stoel Gammon in The Development of Language, “This early period of prelinguistic vocalization can be divided into five stages.” Stage one is crying, stage two is cooing, stage three is vocal play, and stage four is canonical babbling (which begins at about six months of age). The fifth and final stage is conversational babbling (usually demonstrated by about ten months of age) and it is otherwise known as “jargon.” This jargon stage is defined as: “Pre-linguistic vocalizations in which infants use adult like stress and intonation.” (Sroufe, Cooper, & Dehart, 1996, p. 258)

Babbling

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