Besides “mama” and “dada,” few words are more synonymous with baby talk than “goo-goo” and “gaa-gaa.” Want to imitate a baby? Splutter a bunch of meaningless syllables in a row, without any rhyme or reason, and boom — you’ll instantly sound like an 8-month-old. Show The randomized strings of vowels and consonants that babies produce are called babbling. And while it probably seems totally insignificant when your little one is simply talking to themselves while smashing peas into the cracks of their highchair, you might wonder: Is babbling actually as meaningless to your child’s communication skills as it sounds? No. In fact, a wide range of experts, from speech pathologists to pediatricians, know that babbling plays a pretty important role in the language development of infants. It helps them gain control over their articulation and express themselves. Here’s what you should know about this early phase of communication and how you can encourage your little babbler to keep on baby talking. Babbling is sometimes called baby talk (or jargon, when it begins to take on the intonations of speech) because it doesn’t make any sense to people with developed language. It sounds like someone threw a bunch of letters in a box, jumbled them up, and tossed them back out again. To be clear, while babbling is a crucial stepping stone to communication, the words themselves don’t mean anything. In other words, if your baby is singing “babababababa” during breakfast and pointing at a backpack, they’re not actually trying to say “backpack.” They’re just… babbling! But the babbling still has significance. It’s how your child first learns the art of putting sounds together and, later, assigning those sounds some kind of meaning. In fact, babbling is so complex that there are actually three different types of it correlating with different infant ages:
Your baby will start making sounds the minute they’re born, but true speech development in babies doesn’t start until around 4 months old. They’ll babble almost exclusively until about 12 months of age, when their grasp of communication really ramps up. Once they start speaking legit words (and matching them up with their real world counterparts, like “Mama” and “Dada”), babbling decreases. Need a better breakdown? Here’s a timeline:
Remember when we told you that experts know how important baby talk is? Let’s get back to that. In the first 1 or 2 months of your baby’s life, they mostly communicate with you by crying and then smiling. Soon after, though, they start to coo — which, aside from being the cutest sound ever, is a sign that your baby is catching on to this whole “verbal communication” thing. It also means they’re working on strengthening the oral muscles needed for speech, experts say (because even though your baby is sucking on the nipple — yours or a bottle’s — like a piranha around the clock, the muscles needed for talking are slightly different). Babbling is even more important. Babies love to imitate, for sure, but this imitation is also part of how they learn. Interestingly, it’s also part of how babies interact and socialize. A 2017 study suggests that the “conversations” between babies and their mothers, specifically, shapes their language development. When mothers respond to their babbling babies, their language grows — but babies may also be eliciting these responses from their mothers so they can learn to converse. On the flip side, a 2019 study suggests that a delay or absence of canonical babbling in babies can be a marker for the later diagnosis of certain developmental disorders, such as autism, and it draws a connection between baby talk and future language development. All babies develop at different speeds, but in general, most babies will start babbling around 4 to 6 months old and stop babbling around 12 months (or whenever they start speaking their first words). Again, there’s a lot of variability here, but most babies aren’t still babbling by the time they reach 18 months. If your baby doesn’t start babbling (or at least “cooing”) at 4 or 5 months of age, don’t panic — there’s some wiggle room here. However, if your baby is 8 months old and still not babbling, you may want to make an appointment with your pediatrician. A delay in language development can point to a few different causes, ranging from hearing and speech impairments to developmental disorders like autism. Early intervention to any sort of child development delay can go a long way toward improving outlook for you and your child, so don’t hesitate to reach out and ask some questions. If your pediatrician suspects a hearing or speech impairment, they’ll likely refer you to an audiologist and, perhaps, a speech-language pathologist for intervention. If they think the complication might be neurological, your child may need to see a developmental pediatrician or similar type of specialist. If your baby is starting to babble and you want to give them some encouragement to keep going, there are many ways you can coach them along, including:
Listening to your baby babble is entertaining and adorable. But babbling also serves an important purpose in their overall language development. Coming before their first words, babbling often starts around 4 to 6 months of age and continues through the first year. You can encourage it by conversing with your baby, even though neither one of you has any idea what the other is saying, and exposing your baby to language in all its forms, including reading and singing. At what age does an infant's babbling take on the characteristics of her own language?Around 9–10 months, babies can imitate non speech sounds, and speech-like sounds if they are in the child's repertoire of sounds. Infant babbling begins to resemble the native language of a child. The final stage is known as conversational babbling, or the "jargon stage".
What age is the babbling stage?Around six to seven months of age, babies begin to babble. They are now able to produce vowels and combine them with a consonant, generating syllables (e.g., [da]). This is an important milestone in speech development, and one that marks a departure from the imprecise vocalisations of the first months of life.
Is babbling the first stage of language development?Babbling is the term for the second stage of speech development after the newborn stage of crying.
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