Cooing and Babbling

Cooing

-         After several weeks (about 8-20 weeks/2 to 5 months) of extensive interaction with his or her caretaker, the infant begin his/ her experience towards the use of words.

-         They start to coo making soft and pleasant gurgling sounds (vocalizations) such as “aah”, “oah” “uuh” apparently to disclose satisfaction and ease. At this stage they also begin to laugh which is a great reward to parents.

-         Fletcher and Garman (1986:157) said that: “cooing (comfort) sounds are produced in comfortable states, often in response to smiling and talking on the part of the mother”.

-         Bortfeld et al (2005) cited in Preedy (2011:1366) stated that “during the first year of life, studies show that infants are able to distinguish between vowels with similar sounds such as “I” and “a”. Cohen (1999) cited in Gass (2013:110) also described this kind of vocalizations and says that:

-         Coos are not precisely like the regular speech sounds of language, however they suggest that infants are aware of sounds and their potential significance from approximately four to seven months, infants use these cooing sounds to play with such language –related phenomena as loudness and pitch.

-         Infants at this stage begin to in a pre-language conversation with parents (Tamis Le Monda, Cristofaro; Rodriguez, & Bornstein, 2006) i.e. The babies coos, the parents talks backs, the baby looks and laughs, the parents smiles and talks.

-         Adults act as if they understand and carry on conversations, taking turns with whatever the baby responds.

-         Kaniloff ana Kaniloff Smith (2001) provide the following illustration:

·        Mother: oh, so you’re HUNgry, are you?

………..(baby kicks)

·        Mother: YES, you ARE hungry. WELL, we’ll have to give you some MILK then, Won’t we?

………(Baby coos)

·        Mother: AH, so Mommy was Right. It’s MILK you want.

-         Thus, cooing’s main aspect is the use of vowels with a particular tone. This stage is succeeded by another one which is called babbling.

Babbling

When the child is about 6 months he moves from using only vowels and starts mixing them with consonants. This stage is called babbling where we can easily notice the child’s instinctive tendency of using consonants-vowels patterns such as „ba..ba ..ba‟, „da… da… da‟.

-These babbling sounds are commonly interpreted as sounds which refer to their parents or caretakers. For instance, „ma ma‟ refers to the child’s mother and “da da” indicates the child’s dad. Baker and Woll (2008:38) assert that:

From birth to around 8 months in all infants, vocal babbling progresses from vocalic sounds to syllabic combinations. These later syllabic combinations are influenced by the phonology of the spoken language heard by the baby. When well- formed syllabic combinations begin to appear, parents perceive these as intentional communication on the part of the infant, and respond accordingly. This in turns leads to changes in patterns of adult-child vocal interaction.

-The use of a single syllable repeated such as “ba ba ba” or “ga ga ga” is the main feature of the earliest babbling. At this stage the child tends to repeat the syllable which is made up of a consonant like (b or g) linked to a vowel –like sound uttered with an open vocal tract e.g. the sound “a”.

-After an excessive interaction with children psycholinguists commence to distinguish between two types of babbling i.e. marginal babbling and canonical babbling.

The former is closely related to cooing as infants randomly produce a small number of consonants. The latter however, comprises short or long patterns encompassing only one consonant-vowel (CV) associated together and reduplicated frequently.

Infants also show their tendency to a particular consonant type over the others, notably the sounds “m, b, g” and this occurs when the babble- patterns develop and become longer.

At this level, infants’ intonation begins to change and their babble-patterns start to fluctuate by combining the rises and falls of intonation sequences which are congruent with the language that surround them.

De Boyson et al (1991) cited in Clark (2016:110) state that “by ten to twelve months of age many babbled sequences sound compatible with the surrounding language, using similar sound sequences, rhythm and intonation contour”. This means that children are influenced by their parents even at the pre linguistic stages and this can be apparent in their use of a related intonation to the language they hear. In other terms, babbling looks like the language the baby is hearing and this emphasizes on the idea that the feedback of picking up speech participates in language development.