babbling

n. Babbling is one of the landmark developmental stages in first language acquisition. During the first 6 months of life, infants engage in prebabbling behavior, their vocalizations essentially consisting of coos and gurgles, perhaps including sounds (e.g., raspberries) that do not exist in natural languages. At approximately 6 months of age, vocalizations take on a more deliberate character as infants enter the babbling stage. Characteristic of early babbling is the production of multiple repetitions of reduplicated syllables, like [dada], uttered with sentencelike intonation. The segments are usually stop consonants plus the low central vowel, [a]. Advanced babblers produce sequences in which the consonants are more varied, such as [bada baga]. Babbling is a developmental stage that all infants go through, even infants acquiring a sign language, in which case the babbling is performed gesturally rather than vocally. Infants do not babble to communicate; rather, babbling marks a stage during which infants appear to be at play with the phonemic and prosodic building blocks of the language they are acquiring. At around 12 months of age, vocalizations begin to be used meaningfully as the infants’ first words emerge and the transition from babbling to the one-word stage takes place.                                                         

- emf