Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition

Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...

, during which an infant

Infant

A newborn or baby is the very young offspring of a human or other mammal. A newborn is an infant who is within hours, days, or up to a few weeks from birth. In medical contexts, newborn or neonate refers to an infant in the first 28 days after birth...

 appears to be experimenting with uttering sounds of language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

, but not yet producing

Speech production

Speech production is the process by which spoken words are selected to be produced, have their phonetics formulated and then finally are articulated by the motor system in the vocal apparatus...

 any recognizable words. (Crucially, the larynx

Larynx

The larynx , commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the neck of amphibians, reptiles and mammals involved in breathing, sound production, and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. It manipulates pitch and volume...

 or voicebox, originally high in the throat to let the baby breathe while swallowing, descends during the first year of life, allowing a pharynx

Pharynx

The human pharynx is the part of the throat situated immediately posterior to the mouth and nasal cavity, and anterior to the esophagus and larynx. The human pharynx is conventionally divided into three sections: the nasopharynx , the oropharynx , and the laryngopharynx...

 to develop and all the sounds of human speech

Speech

Speech is the human faculty of speaking.It may also refer to:* Public speaking, the process of speaking to a group of people* Manner of articulation, how the body parts involved in making speech are manipulated...

 to be formed.) Babbling begins at approximately 5 to 7 months of age, when a baby's noises begin to sound like phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s. Infants begin to produce recognizable words usually around 12 months, though babbling may continue for some time afterward.

Types of babbling

There are two types of babbling. Most people are familiar with the characteristic sounds made during babbling, namely reduplicative and variegated babbling. The former consists of repeated syllables, such as /ba/ e.g. "Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba", or /goo/ e.g. "goo-goo" whereas variegated babbling consists of a mix of syllables, e.g. "ka-da-bu-ba-mi-doy-doy-doy".

The consonants that babbling infants produce tend to be any of the following : /p, b, t, m, d, n, k, ɡ, s, h, w, j/. The following consonants tend to be infrequently produced during phonological development : /f, v, θ, ð, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ, l, r, ŋ/. The complex nature of sounds that developing children produce make them difficult to categorize, but the above rules tend to hold true regardless of the language to which children are exposed.

Babbling in nonhuman species

Human babies engage in babble as a sort of vocal play that occurs in a few other primate

Primate

A primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...

 species, all which belong to the family Callitrichidae (marmoset

Marmoset

Marmosets are the 22 New World monkey species of the genera Callithrix, Cebuella, Callibella, and Mico. All four genera are part of the biological family Callitrichidae. The term marmoset is also used in reference to the Goeldi's Monkey, Callimico goeldii, which is closely related.Most marmosets...

s & tamarin

Tamarin

The tamarins are squirrel-sized New World monkeys from the family Callitrichidae in the genus Saguinus. They are closely related to the lion tamarins in the genus Leontopithecus.- Range :...

s) and are cooperative breeders.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sarah Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made several major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.-Early life:...

 writes, "...marmoset and tamarin babies also babble. It may be that the infants of cooperative breeders are specially equipped to communicate with caretakers. This is not to say that babbling is not an important part of learning to talk, only to question which came first—babbling so as to develop into a talker, or a predisposition to evolve into a talker because among cooperative breeders, babies that babble are better tended and more likely to survive."

Babbling in humans

Terrence W. Deacon

Terrence Deacon

Terrence William Deacon is an American anthropologist . He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.-Theoretical interests:Prof...

 suggests that human infants are not generally excited or upset when babbling, because they 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 mimicry that happens in correspondence to the maturation of the cortical motor output pathways in the human brain."

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...

 compares a child babbling to a person fiddling with a complex hi-fi system in an attempt to understand what the controls do. 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 he is exposed.

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 infants are exposed to sign language

Sign language

A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's...

, regardless of whether they themselves are deaf or hearing, they will babble with their hands at approximately the same time vocal babbling appears, although sign production appears a few months before word production generally does in hearing children.

At 0–4 months babies gurgle, and coo (vowel sounds such as "oooh" and "aah"). At 4–6 months babies may start to babble (adding consonants: "gaga", "dada"). At 6–12 months of age, babies typically babble and enjoy vocal play as they experiment with a range of sounds. At 12–18 months, toddlers begin to use sound in a meaningful way. They utter one-syllable words, make sounds imitating 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, known as holophrasis

Holophrasis

Holophrasis is the prelinguistic use of a single word to express a complex idea. A holophrase may resemble an interjection, but whereas an interjection is linguistic, and has a specific grammatical function, a holophrase is simply a vocalization memorized by rote and used without grammatical...

. For example, "Juice" may mean, "Mother, I would like some juice", "You are drinking juice", or "Oh look, there is juice in the cup". At age 18–24 months, toddlers repeat words and can link words into short sentences. They use approximately 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 incorrectly, e.g., a child with a pet dog might describe all large furry animals as "doggie".

According to Menn and Stoel Gammon in The Development of Language, "This early period of prelinguistic vocalization can be divided into five stages", the first of which starts at about age six months. Stage one is crying, stage two is cooing, stage three is vocal play, and stage four is canonical babbling. The fifth and final stage is conversational babbling, also known as the "jargon stage" (usually occurring by about ten months of age). This jargon stage is defined as "pre-linguistic vocalizations in which infants use adult-like stress and intonation".

Hence, 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 commence vocal development by crying, progress to loud yelling noises, and finally make speech.

Children who cannot babble for some physiological reason, such as having a breathing tube

Tracheal tube

A tracheal tube is a catheter that is inserted into the trachea in order for the primary purpose of establishing and maintaining a patent airway and to ensure the adequate exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Many different types of tracheal tubes are available, suited for different specific...

in their throat, do subsequently acquire normal pronunciation but their speech development is significantly delayed.