Babbling gives rise to a feedback loop in which mothers respond better to directed babbling and that further structures the apparent gobbledygook that the baby is speaking nearer to actual language skills
And you thought your baby’s babbling was just about cuteness. New research shows in that babbling lies the key to his or her future language skills.
The study sheds light on correlations between early babbling and later language and studies finding that babies with more advanced syllables in their babbling have more advanced speech and vocabulary when they’re older.
It’s long been known that babies modify their sounds to become more speech-like in response to feedback from their caregivers, and that they learn things have names by caregivers naming objects. But how do specific types of babbling elicit particular parental behavior.
To answer this, the research team – Rachel Albert, assistant professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College, Jennifer Schwade, senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell University, and Michael Goldstein, associate professor of psychology at Cornell University – recorded and recombined the vocalizations of 40 nine-month-olds and their mothers, using a “playback paradigm,” widely used in animal studies, to assess how specific forms of sounds and actions by infants influenced parental behavior.
“We expected that mothers would respond more often when babbling was more mature, and they did. The increased rate of response meant more language-learning opportunities for the baby. The mothers’ speech was also more likely to contain simplified, learnable information about linguistic structure and the objects around the baby. Thus, by varying the form and context of their vocalizations, infants influence maternal behavior and create social interactions that facilitate learning,” said Goldstein.
The researchers also found that mothers responded more often and more informatively to vocalizations directed at objects than those that were undirected.
“We think there may be a kind of feedback loop, where for example parents’ labeling objects and rewarding more advanced vocalizations by responding more frequently promotes word learning,” said Schwade.
These results may help in understanding delayed vocal development in at-risk populations and those with hearing delays, Down syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. Fewer vocal interactions between children and caregivers, write the researchers, could “cascade into long-term differences in response expectancies, impacting language development over time as opportunities for learning from contingent parental responses are reduced.
