Mitsuhiko Ota
University of Edinburgh, UK
Babies don’t appear to understand one another’s babbling in the way adults understand speech. When infants babble, they are probably practising how to produce speech sounds, matching what they can do with their vocal tract to the sounds they hear from adults. Because these sounds resemble real language, they can give the impression of meaningful conversation – but they aren’t attempts to express specific ideas or messages.
For the same reason, other babies are unlikely to interpret babbling as meaningful speech. What they may share, however, is the experience of taking turns making speech-like sounds. In that sense, babbling together could feel like communicating, even if nothing specific is being said.
Emily Jones
University of London, UK
Babies recognise and pay attention to language from very early in development. Babies can recognise familiar voices soon after birth. One of those voices is their own: babies will smile at the sound of themselves, compared with listening intently to the sound of another baby. Attention to language helps create a contact loop between infants and other people, and so the fact that babies listen when another baby babbles indicates they understand the communicative intent.
Listening to themselves babbling is also crucial, as this creates a feedback loop to link meaning with speaking, which helps them to refine their babbles into early words by their first birthday. An infant’s ability to understand their own babbling is thus probably a critical step in early language development. Babies also show some understanding of another infant’s babbling: they are more likely to smile in response to a happy vocalisation and frown in response to a sad one, showing they understand early emotion. Babies also recognise a change in vowel sounds when they listen to another infant. Indeed, infants have a stronger ability to differentiate sounds from other languages than adults do, because with age, we tune in to our native language at the expense of others.
This means they can process babbling better than adults can, but testing whether they understand it requires us to develop new methods to study what a baby “means” (if anything) by each babble. It is something we don’t have yet.
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