Babbling is a period of childhood development and a condition of vocabulary acquisition in which a toddler attempts to explore with articulating sounds but cannot yet create identifiable phrases. Moreover, Morgan and Wren (2018) described babbling as a phase of pre-linguistic speech advancement characterized by repeating consonant-vowel sounds. When babies begin to communicate through babbling, they all use the same words independent of the dominant language. Consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /w/, and /j/ appear often in the babbling of newborns, irrespective of language context (Morgan & Wren, 2018). Some of the benefits of universal babbling in language acquisition among infants are discussed herein in the paper.
Babbling is a crucial period in language development since it demonstrates that children already comprehend fundamental linguistic meanings at younger ages. Babbling is a developmental stage in which newborns experiment with various kinds of intonation in their speech, elevating the pitch and intensity of their vocals throughout the sequence of sounds they make (Goswami, 2022). In addition, newborns may also acquire and exhibit how to take turns during this point of their development. Therefore, this implies that caregivers and others should connect with toddlers while they babble to explain how speech is employed in communication. A child is inclined to babble less and utilize formal phrases more frequently as they develop (Morgan & Wren, 2018). This is because a child typically starts forming specific characters after reaching this developmental point. These words are generally short utterances, such as up or please.
Finally, babbling proves to be a critical diagnostic signal as well. The capability of a kid to incorporate consonants in their speech is a powerful indication of subsequent communicative competence. Assessment of early indicators of speech results is advantageous for excluding infants, not in danger of developing future speech disorders, and identifying newborns who are more susceptible to aberrant linguistic mechanisms. In their research, Yankowitz et al. (2019) enumerated the importance of childhood syllable articulation and babbling rhythms to increase people’s comprehension of the connection between earlier and later word learning. They insinuated that autism, child apraxia of voice, and communication and speech difficulties had been linked to babbling deficits.
References
Goswami, U. (2022). Language acquisition and speech rhythm patterns: An auditory neuroscience perspective. Royal Society Open Science, 9(7), 1-13.
Morgan, L., & Wren, Y. E. (2018). A systematic review of the literature on early vocalizations and babbling patterns in young children. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 40(1), 3-14.
Yankowitz, L. D., Schultz, R. T., & Parish-Morris, J. (2019). Pre-and paralinguistic vocal production in ASD: Birth through school age. Current psychiatry reports, 21(12), 1-22.