Pre-Babbling In Infants

Infants have an incredible mind in that they have the ability to learn and master a language in a relatively quick matter of time. The elasticity of babies and children’s brains is remarkable. It has been quite astonishing to watch my eleven month old niece grow and learn as she studies the things that my family and I say and do. She understands a range of words and sentences even though she is not able to actually articulate them yet. Soon she will be going from a blabbering mumbo jumbo speaking baby to being able to annunciate clear, complex words and sentences in only a matter of years. Neuroscientists are now able to paint a picture of the transitional period of what happens in a baby’s brain during this learning process.

During late infancy stage, an infant’s abilities to process, understand and produce language is important and begins as soon as the child is born. Infants recognize sounds in their environment, such as a mother’s voice. Infants also become aware of their native language, those babbling sounds become clear. “Ma-ma” or Da-da is usually heard and is often repeated. Babbling sounds may not refer to anything specific, “Ma-ma” can be signified as

From birth to 3 months their main source of communication will be crying. At this stage babies have very little understanding of what is happening to them and they do not know they are people. They will have different crying sounds and these will depend on what the baby needs for example for hunger, pain, feeling wet, fear and loneliness.

Finally, at the end of my observations hours I reached to the conclusion that babies or infants use different ways to communicate with adults doing sounds, gestures, and expressions, and crying its one of the most common way that babies use to tell us what they want or what they

Between the ages of 0-3 months children react to certain sounds with startle (moro reflex). Children begin to react to sounds which are close by, by the age of 2-4 months children will begin to develop distance hearing. Children are then awakened by loud noises, sounds and voices. Towards the end of the third month a baby is able to recognise there mother's voice and will stop crying in order to listen to to voices and there own sounds. Babies are unable to control there motor movements, therefore most of there actions are reflexes. One of the most important reflexes for there speech development is the rhythmic suck-swallow pattern. Babies of this age are now able to move in response to voices and are able to express there feelings by cooing and gurgling.

around 3 months infants begin to make babbling noises because they are learning to control

Crying is the main way babies communicate at 0-3 months. They will cry to express how they feel for example this could be when they are feeling hungry or when they want attention.

In this article, we learn about the process and connection between infant word learning and parents’ responsiveness to their infants growing vocabulary and multimodal behavior. One of the first major theoretical perspectives the authors, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Yana Kuchirko, and Lulu Song, state is responsiveness and early language development. In this perspective, research has shown how infant babbling has sophisticatedly progressed due to the mother’s responsiveness to her child. I don’t find it suspiring that in one study they found that infants of high-responsive mothers were more likely to achieve language milestones two months earlier than those that had low-responsive mothers. This theory familiarizes with a lot of the themes we encountered in class and in the book – the more involvement the parents have with their infant, the more positive their outcome compared to others.

They examined the infant’s attention to speech to determine language development. The main purpose was to compare whether infant-directed speech or adult-directed speech influenced the infant’s attention to speech. The researchers also wanted to conclude if the infants with cochlear implants payed attention to infant-directed speech and to see if that associated with language development. The results established that infant-directed speech does have an effect on deaf infants, with cochlear implants, attention to speech. Infants with cochlear implants prefer infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech and this has a result on language development (Wang et al.,

Infants were placed in the experimental condition and then the yoked-control condition. Sessions were either 24hours apart, 48 hours apart or the same day. Mothers and their infants were observed during two paly sessions, each being 30 minutes long. The timing of mothers’ responses was manipulated in order to single out the role of contingency in vocal learning and then all vocalizations between both mother and child were coded. Friedman ANOVA-by–ranks tests and post hoc tests were used to establish correlations. The data showed that the infants’ behavior was sensitive to the environment of the infant. In situations where the infant had freedom their behavior was still linked with the behavior of their caregivers (Goldstein, p. 8034). The finding that interaction between caregiver and infant has a significant effect on the infants’ behavior eliminates the belief that speech development is mostly due to memory and motor development. The study sheds light on a viable alternative to the belief that speech development is due to physical development and not attributed to social interactions. This will hopefully result in caregivers and those who study early childhood development to focus a lot more on ensuring that infants participate in a healthy amount of social

These data also indicate that imitation may not be as strong of a mechanism for the development of infant vocalization but positive reinforcement may act as a mechanism to increase babbling. The mothers responded to the infants vocalizations by simply smiling, moving closer and touching them which acted as a positive reinforcement. Thus, the increase in their babbling was not a means of imitating the mother (Goldstein et al, 2003, 8034). Instead, they were receiving positive feedback each time they vocalized which was a positive reinforcement for the child to want to continue producing

The question this experiment raised was regarding vocal development in humans and the influence the actions of social partners makes on it. The objective was to determine the relationship between these socializations and vocal development by looking at infants and their caregivers. The more specific questions raised included the “social contingency” and whether it provides opportunities for vocal learning in infants, and whether infants can learn through their caregivers’ responses to the vocalizations they make. Studying infants at approximately eight months old allowed their vocal behavior to be in a transitory state where the sensitive system of acoustic variability could be examined. Having the experiment take place in the large playroom allowed the infants to move around, not feel confined, and not feel forced into interaction with their mothers, allowing it to be more comfortable and natural for the infant. First, infants were assigned to either the contingent condition or the yoked-control condition. Half of the mothers were in the contingent condition group, where they were told to react immediately after the infants made a vocalization. The other half of the mothers were in the yoked-control condition group, and were told to respond by

From a developmental perspective, this statement is supported by the research finding that infants have the ability to discriminate speech sounds before they are even exposed to certain languages; however, as they grow older, because of the influence of input from their native languages, infants start to lose sensitivity to non-native speech sound contrasts (e.g. Werker & Tees, 1984). Werker and Tees (1984) provided such evidence, who conducted a series of studies that investigated the development of infants’ speech perception ability, comparing the infants with adults.

The ability for an infant to develop speech is dependent upon the ability of the child to distinguish rhythms of sounds and tones. The infant must break down the phrases of speech that at first sound like pieces of music with varying tones and cadences into distinct words which are linked to meaning. Infants begin breaking down language before they are one year old (Swingley, 2000). The ability to distinguish different sounds from each other, identifying the configuration of words, and recognize that some sounds are similar while other sounds are different is called phonological awareness. This awareness begins in infancy and can be measured as early as age 2. The definition of phonological

As a child develops along their journey to acquire language, they go through several steps, of which all are crucial to the successful mastering of their native tongue. There is debate over whether the period of acquisition known as babbling is the first or second stage – Berk (1991) mentions that they class babbling as the first stage, but note that there is a previous stage before that, known as the ‘cooing’ stage; following this, this essay will refer to babbling as the second stage of language acquisition. To introduce a general overview of this particular stage, Berk (1991) explains that cooing usually develops into babbling at around 6