Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words.
Babbling begins shortly after birth and progresses through several stages as the infant's repertoire of sounds expands and vocalizations become more speech-like.
[1] Infants typically begin to produce recognizable words when they are around 12 months of age, though babbling may continue for some time afterward.
Abnormal developments such as certain medical conditions, developmental delays, and hearing impairments may interfere with a child's ability to babble normally.
The following consonants tend to be infrequently produced during phonological development: /f, v, θ, ð, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ, l, r, ŋ/.
The complexity of the sounds that infants produce makes them difficult to categorize, but the above rules tend to hold true regardless of the language to which children are exposed.
From birth to 1 month, babies produce mainly pleasure sounds, cries for assistance, and responses to the human voice.
[14] Around 3 months, babies begin making elongated vowel sounds "oooo" "aaaa", and will respond vocally to speech of others.
During the canonical stage, the babbling involves reduplicated sounds containing alternations of vowels and consonants, for example, "baba" or "bobo".
[15] Around 7 months, babies can produce several sounds in one breath, and they also recognize different tones and inflections in other speakers.
Usually occurring by about ten months of age, the jargon stage is defined as "pre-linguistic vocalizations in which infants use adult-like stress and intonation".
The hand gestures contain a restricted set of phonetic units, show a syllabic organization, and are used without reference or meaning.
When signing children are in fact babbling it will most often take place in front of their torso in a designated area that is called the phonetic space.
[4] Contemporary research supports the notion that babbling is directly related to the development of language as discussed in The Continuity Hypothesis.
It descends during the first year of life, allowing the pharynx to develop and facilitates the production of adult-like speech sounds.
The opening and closing of the mouth alone will not produce babbling, and phonation (or voicing) is necessary during the movement in order to create a meaningful sound.
Other important oral structures involved in articulation, such as the tongue, lips and teeth remain in a stable resting position during babbling.
[18] Signing infants produce manual babbling through similar rhythmic alternations, but they perform with their hands instead of their mouths.
As a baby goes beyond the reduplicated sequences of babbling, they exhibit equal sized mouth or hand openings on the right and left sides.
[21] Deaf children are not only significantly delayed in spoken language development in comparison to their hearing counterparts, but they also produce fewer noises.
[26] A number of solutions have been used for hearing-impaired humans to gain auditory experience, one of which is hearing aids; they can be used to help infants reach babbling stages earlier.
These ranges of sounds are used in the young of many species to experiment with sound-making capabilities, or to practice for future vocal behavior.
[16] Not only are songbird and human language parallel regarding neural and molecular factors, they also are similar in how their communication is initially produced.
Another relation to human infants is that the amount of vocalizations is not key, but rather the quality of the sounds that is retained and resembles the final produce of language.
The properties of the ear and vocal tract, as well as the brain regions used in analyzing and processing information are critical determinants of how song is interpreted and later produced.
This variety of call forms produced by this creature is comparable to babbling in human infants for a number of reasons.
As human infants have, marmoset babies have higher rates of social interaction when producing babbling sounds.
Overall, babbling progresses through a series of stages from infancy to adulthood and slowly leads to the construction of adult calls.
The pups repeat and combine adult vocalizations so that they resemble babbling in what humans, other primates and some songbirds do as infants.
Babbling is common in infants that have a large repertoire of adult vocalizations to learn and this is seen in the pups of sac-winged bat.