Concept

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. 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 is assumed to occur in all children acquiring language. Particularly it has been studied in English, Italian, Korean, French, Spanish, Japanese and Swedish.

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Related publications (3)

Social babbling: The emergence of symbolic gestures and words

Aude Billard, Laura Bénédicte Marine Cohen

Language acquisition theories classically distinguish passive language understanding from active language production. However, recent findings show that brain areas such as Broca's region are shared in language understanding and production. Furthermore, th ...
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2018

Neural Decoding of Discriminative Auditory Object Features Depends on Their Socio-Affective Valence

Melissa Saenz, Wietske Van der Zwaag

Human voices consist of specific patterns of acoustic features that are considerably enhanced during affective vocalizations. These acoustic features are presumably used by listeners to accurately discriminate between acoustically or emotionally similar vo ...
Oxford University Press (OUP)2016

An Imitation Model based on Central Pattern Generator with application in Robotic Marionette Behavior Learning

Mostafa Ajallooeian

Most of the Central Pattern Generator (CPG) models are based on defining explicit dynamical systems and finding the appropriate parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel CPG model that is based on altering a nonlinear oscillator to obtain desired limit ...
Ieee Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Po Box 1331, Piscataway, Nj 08855-1331 Usa2009
Related concepts (8)
Speech
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are the same word, e.g., "role" or "hotel"), and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many different intentional speech acts, e.
Baby talk
Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parentese, or motherese. CDS is characterized by a "sing song" pattern of intonation that differentiates it from the more monotone style used with other adults e.g., CDS has higher and wider pitch, slower speech rate and shorter utterances.
Speech production
Speech production is the process by which thoughts are translated into speech. This includes the selection of words, the organization of relevant grammatical forms, and then the articulation of the resulting sounds by the motor system using the vocal apparatus. Speech production can be spontaneous such as when a person creates the words of a conversation, reactive such as when they name a picture or read aloud a written word, or imitative, such as in speech repetition.
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