Babbling:
Babbling is the first stage of language acquisition. At birth, baby's appear to recognize the differences between noise and speech sounds when they respond to their mother's voice within only a few weeks. From one month, babies appear able to distinguish between different sounds. By the time the baby reaches three months it is able to produce vowel sounds that are formed with the tongue slightly raised at the back of the mouth. The shape of the mouth is often rounded, producing a cooing sound. Parents are delighted when their child produces babbling sounds such as ba-ba and da-da and think their child may be producing the words baby and daddy. However, it is more likely that the child is experimenting with sounds and does not associate the words with the person until later when these sounds appear as words regularly in the child's vocabulary. Babbling increases in frequency until twelve months, at which time children produce their first meaningful words. When children have acquired about fifty words they begin to adopt fairly regular patterns of pronunciation, leading into the one word stage. Very few consonant clusters are present in this stage. Repeated syllables are very common. Throughout the stage, your child will develop more and more control not only over its vocal communication but also over its physical communication, such as body language and gesturing. |
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0YakLIa5to)
Above is a video displaying the babbling stage (from 0:00 - 0:012), later showing the two word stage which we will be discussed later. As you can see in this video, numerous sequences of syllables such as 'ma-ma' are produced, 'ma-ma' meaing "mother" or "mum". |