Parents, listen next time your baby babbles
Pay attention, mom and dad, especially when your infant looks at you and babbles.
Parents may not understand a baby’s prattling, but by listening and responding, they let their infants know they can communicate which leads to children forming complex sounds and using language more quickly.
That’s according to a new study by the University of Iowa and Indiana University that found how parents respond to their children’s babbling can actually shape the way infants communicate and use vocalizations.
The findings challenge the belief that human communication is innate and can’t be influenced by parental feedback. Instead, the researchers argue, parents who consciously engage with their babbling infants can accelerate their children’s vocalizing and language learning.
“It’s not that we found responsiveness matters,” says Julie Gros-Louis, assistant professor of psychology at the UI and corresponding author on the study, published in the July/August edition of the journal Infancy. “It’s how a mother responds that matters.”
Researchers observed the interactions between 12 mothers and their 8-month-old infants during free play twice a month for 30 minutes over a six-month period. They noted how the mothers responded to their child’s positive vocalizations, such as babbling and cooing, especially when it was directed toward the mother. Current research in Gros-Louis’s lab has found similar levels of responsiveness of mothers and fathers to infants’ babbling.
What does it mean when babies babble?
At early ages when babbling first appears (6 to 8 months), babbling doesn’t truly “mean” anything. A baby may repeat the syllables “ma-ma-ma-ma” but may not yet realize that these sounds can be used to represent his mother. Rather, he is simply experimenting with the mouth and the process of sound formation. But that doesn’t mean that babbling is not important!
As children experiment with sounds and learn how to control their articulators, they are setting the stage for the development of their first words and for future language skills. Also, babbling helps babies experience the social aspects of communication. Parents will often engage in turn-taking with their babies where the baby will babble and then the adult will imitate the production or vary the sound and see if the child will imitate the new sound. In this way, babies learn about crucial social language skills like turn-taking, eye contact and imitation.
What is reduplicated babbling?
Reduplicated babbling means that the baby is repeating the same syllable several times. So “ma-ma-ma” and “pa-pa-pa” are reduplicated whereas “go-bi-da-too-la” has a varied consonant and vowel structure so it is an example of variegated babbling. Children typically begin babbling by producing reduplicated syllables and then gradually add the ability to produce variegated syllables as they become more skilled at producing sounds.
What researchers discovered is infants whose mothers responded to what they thought their babies were saying, showed an increase in developmentally advanced, consonant-vowel vocalizations, which means the babbling has become sophisticated enough to sound more like words. The babies also began directing more of their babbling over time toward their mothers.
On the other hand, infants whose mothers did not try as much to understand them and instead directed their infants’ attention at times to something else did not show the same rate of growth in their language and communication skills.
Gros-Louis says the difference was mothers who engaged with their infants when they babbled let their children know they could communicate. Consequently, those babies turned more often to their mothers and babbled.
“The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative,” Gros-Louis says.
What are characteristics of reduplicated babbling?
In reduplicated babbling, the child will produce the same exact consonant and vowel structure again and again — “bu-bu-bu-bu-bu” or “na-na-na-na.” This type of babbling is much easier to produce than a varied string of consonants and vowels so we tend to see it at an earlier age.
Are these twins having a conversation?
In many ways they are. In the video you will be able to see each child take a conversational turn (some turns are longer than others) while the other child responds to the communicative attempts of the speaker. Both babies shift between these roles as the video continues so each gets a chance to be the speaker and the listener. These are the core elements of a conversation.
In addition, both babies are laughing and looking at one another and are imitating some gestures and movements in addition to their speech. They are clearly enjoying “talking” to one another. So although there may not be a true exchange of information, there is plenty of social reinforcement going on.
In a survey a month after the study ended, mothers who were most attentive to their infants’ babbling reported their children produced more words and gestures at age 15 months.
Gros-Louis was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana when she, Andrew King, a senior scientist in psychology, and Meredith West, a psychology professor at Indiana, conducted the mother-infant study, titled “Maternal Responsiveness and the Development of Directed Vocalizing in Social Interactions.”
“Julie is showing that social stimulation shapes at a very early age what children attend to,” says King. “And if you can show the parent can shape what an infant attends to, there is the possibility to shape what the child is sensitive to. They are learning how to learn.”
The current study builds upon previous research by King and West, published in 2003 in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In that study, mothers were instructed to respond positively - such as smiling or touching - each time their infants looked at them and babbled. The results found the babies learned to vocalize advanced syllable-like sounds more readily than the typical infant.
Gros-Louis and her colleagues took that research a step further by observing the interactions of mothers and infants over a longer period of time and without instructing the mothers how to respond. Thus, they added a control group - the mothers who directed their babies’ attention elsewhere versus those who actively engaged when their infants looked at them and babbled.
Once again, the results showed infants whose mothers attended more closely to their babbling vocalized more complex sounds and develop language skills sooner.
Combined, the two studies could change how people think about human communicative development. However, additional research involving more participants is needed to validate the findings, the researchers said.
“The debate here is huge,” King says.
Funding for the research came from a grant awarded to Gros-Louis from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health (F32 HD045040-01).
Contacts
Sara Agnew, Office of Strategic Communcation , 319-384-0073
Julie Gros-Louis, Department of Psychology, 319-384-1816