Babbling
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. Infants typically begin to produce recognizable words when they are around 12 months of age, though babbling may continue for some time afterward.
Babbling can be seen as a precursor to language development or simply as vocal experimentation. The physical structures involved in babbling are still being developed in the first year of a child's life. This continued physical development is responsible for some of the changes in abilities and variations of sound babies can produce. Abnormal developments such as certain medical conditions, developmental delays, and hearing impairments may interfere with a child's ability to babble normally. Though there is still disagreement about the uniqueness of language to humans, babbling is not unique to the human species.
Typical development
Babbling is a stage in language acquisition. Babbles are separated from language because they do not convey meaning or refer to anything specific like words do. Human infants are not necessarily excited or upset when babbling; they may also babble spontaneously and incessantly when they are emotionally calm.The sounds of babbling are produced before an infant begins to construct recognizable words. This can be partly attributed to the immaturity of the vocal tract and neuromusculature at this age in life. Infants first begin vocalizing by crying, followed by cooing and then vocal play. These first forms of sound production are the easiest for children to use because they contain natural, reflexive, mostly vowel sounds.
Babbling usually occurs in all children acquiring language. Particularly it has been studied in English, Italian, Korean, French, Spanish, Japanese and Swedish. Infants across the world follow general trends in babbling tendencies. Differences that do appear are the result of the infants' sensitivity to the characteristics of the language they are exposed to. Infants mimic the prosody of the language they are exposed to. They use intonation patterns and timing that matches the characteristics of their parent language. Infants also babble using the consonants and vowels that occur most frequently in their parent language. Most babbling consists of a small number of sounds, which suggests the child is preparing the basic sounds necessary to speak the language to which they are exposed.
The consonants that babbling infants produce tend to be any of the following: p, b, t, d, k, g, m, n, s, h, w, j. The following consonants tend to be infrequently produced during phonological development: f, v, th, sh, ch, l, r, ng. 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.
The sounds produced in babble have been categorised relative to their components. For example, babble may be broken down into syllables that contain a consonant and a vowel and syllables that contain only a vowel sound. These components have been studied in relation to speech development in children, and have been found to relate to future speech outcomes.
If babbling occurs during the first year of life, it can typically be concluded that the child is developing speech normally. As babies grow and change, their vocalizations will change as well.
Timeline of typical vocal development
Infants follow a general timeline of vocal developments in childhood. This timeline provides a general outline of expected developments from birth to age one. Babbling usually lasts 6–9 months in total. The babbling period ends at around 12 months because it is the age when first words usually occur. However, individual children can show large variability, and this timeline is only a guideline.From birth to 1 month, babies produce mainly pleasure sounds, cries for assistance, and responses to the human voice.
Around 2 months, babies can distinguish between different speech sounds, and can make "goo"ing sounds.
Around 3 months, babies begin making elongated vowel sounds "oooo" "aaaa", and will respond vocally to speech of others. They continue to make predominantly vowel sounds.
Around 4 months, babies may vary their pitch, and imitate tones in adult speech.
Around 5 months, babies continue to experiment with sound, imitating some sounds made by adults.
Around 6 months, babies vary volume, pitch and rate. When infants are 6 months old they are finally able to control the opening and closing of the vocal tract, and upon obtaining this ability, infants begin to distinguish between the different sounds of vowels and consonants. This age is often distinguished as the beginning of the canonical stage. During the canonical stage, the babbling involves reduplicated sounds containing alternations of vowels and consonants, for example, "baba" or "bobo". Reduplicated babbling consists of repeated syllables consisting of consonant and a vowel such as "da da da da" or "ma ma ma ma".
Around 7 months, babies can produce several sounds in one breath, and they also recognize different tones and inflections in other speakers.
Around 8 months, babies can repeat emphasized syllables. They imitate gestures and tonal quality of adult speech. They also produce variegated babbling. Variegated babbles contain mixes of consonant vowel combinations such as "ka da by ba mi doy doy". Variegated babbling differs from reduplicated babbling in terms of the variation and complexity of syllables that are produced.
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". 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 general structure of the syllables that they are producing is very closely related to the sounds of their native language and this form of babbling significantly predicts the form of early words.
Around 11 months, babies imitate inflections, rhythms, and expressions of speakers.
By 12 months, babies typically can speak one or more words. These words now refer to the entity which they name; they are used to gain attention or for a specific purpose. Children continue to produce jargon babbles beyond their first words.
Manual babbling
is structurally identical to vocal babbling in its development. Just as hearing and/or speaking infants babble with their mouths, infants who grow up with a sign language babble with their hands. If a hearing infant has deaf and/or mute parents or parents who otherwise use a sign language, they will still imitate the signs that they see their parents displaying. This is evidence that manual babbling is possible in both hearing and deaf infants, and in both speaking and mute infants.All babies imitate with their hands the movements that they see. Typical gestures for example are raising arms to be lifted up, or grabbing/reaching to indicate wanting a bottle; these are used referentially. In addition, infants who grow up with a sign language begin to make gestures that are distinct from all other hand movements and gestures.
After it was established that infants could babble with their hands and their mouths, the patterns in which productions occurred were studied. Speaking and signing infants follow very similar maturational paths in language acquisition. Both go through a number of stages, and exhibit similar complexity in their babbling sequences. In studies where deaf and hearing children were compared, children learning sign language produced more multi-movement manual babbling than children who were not learning a sign language. There are three main components of manual babbling. The hand gestures contain a restricted set of phonetic units, show a syllabic organization, and are used without reference or meaning. This is comparable to aspects of vocal babbling as mentioned above. It is difficult to study manual babbling as often the manual activity can be mistaken as gestures rather than signs. 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. One of the most common forms of manual babbling is the extension and spreading of all fingers. This babble is also one of the first indicators that an infant will begin to make in manual communication.
Children are able to produce signs correctly, which is important since many articulation tendencies of manual babbling transfer to the children's early sign production. Children acquire signs for the same concepts as speaking children's words, and in the same stage of development.
Transition from babbling to language
Two hypotheses have been devised in order to explain how babbling is related to language development.- Discontinuity hypothesis – This early hypothesis suggests that babbling has absolutely no relationship to language development. If true, infants would produce a full range of random sounds in no particular order during the babbling stage. However, it has been demonstrated that early babbling is quite limited. Supporters of this hypothesis also thought that children might drop certain sounds only to pick them up again in later months. Supporters proposed it would be possible for babies to incorrectly and inconsistently use sounds that they had already mastered in the early babbling stages later in life or even lose sounds altogether before learning how to speak. The hypothesis also implies that when children finally reach the age where they are able to learn their native language, they develop phonological sounds in an orderly manner. Over time, infants will relearn sounds and develop words in a specific language. Current evidence does not support these claims.
- Continuity hypothesis – According to this hypothesis, babbling is a direct forerunner to language. At first, infants produce universal sounds that exist in all areas of the world and in all languages. Reduplicated canonical babbling produces a number of sounds but only some of them are recognized as meaningful and thus reinforced by caregivers and parents, while the others are abandoned as meaningless. This hypothesis agrees with the claim that the anatomical changes of the vocal tract are very important, but suggests that the social environment in which an infant is raised has a greater influence on the development of language. Infants pay close attention to their caregivers' reactions and use their feedback as approval for the sounds that they are making. This reinforcement through feedback helps infants to focus their attention on specific features of sound. Social feedback facilitates faster learning and earlier production of a variety of advanced words. There is evidence that babbling varies depending on the linguistic environment in which a baby is raised. Current babbling research supports The Continuity Hypothesis. For example, it has been noted that infants raised in French speaking environments display greater amounts of rising intonation in comparison to infants raised in English speaking environments. This is likely due to the differences between French and English intonations while speaking. The ordering of consonants and vowels in the babbling of English, French, Swedish and Japanese infants also appears to resemble that of their native language. These findings support another hypothesis, the "babbling drift hypothesis" in which infant babbling resembles the phonetic characteristics of a child's native language through exposure to speech. When babies are exposed to two languages, their babbles resemble the language that they are most exposed to. The dominant language is considered to be the one that children have the most exposure to. Most often infants do not produce a blend of language styles while babbling however, may switch between languages. Sometimes infants may choose which language style they prefer to babble in based upon particular features. The babbling drift hypothesis provides further support for The Continuity Hypothesis.