Before Words: A Quick Guide to Babbling
Before Words: A Quick Guide to Babbling
Quiet is not usually a word that comes to mind when we think of baby’s first year of life and rightly so! Even though baby’s first word doesn’t appear until around 12 months, there are a several developmental stages of language before real words start to appear. This makes for a noisy baby! These stages are listed below.
0-1 month: Phonation
During baby’s first month of life, you can expect to hear many reflexive sounds (burping, crying, sneezing, etc.).
2-3 months: Cooing and Gooing
During baby’s second and third month of life, you can expect to hear them cooing and gooing. Coo’s and goo’s are elongated vowels such as “ooooo” or “ahhh.” Coo’s and goo’s can also contain the combination of both a vowel and a consonant. Consonants produced in the back of the mouth are most frequently used in cooing and gooing (e.g. “k” or “g”).
4-6 months: Exploration/Expansion
During baby’s fourth, fifth, and sixth month of life, you can expect to hear a wide variety of vocalizations and sounds. As baby practices moving his mouth to make sounds, he or she will become more and more in control of their voice. Common sounds you may hear are, raspberries, trills, squeals, and growls. They will also continue to combine consonants and vowels together while vocalizing.
7-9 months: Canonical babbling
During baby’s seventh, eighth, and ninth month of life, you can expect to hear more and more vowel and consonant combinations. Baby will continue to learn more and more consonant sounds and will begin reduplicated babbling (e.g. “mama”). Baby will begin to use more consonants that are produced in the front of the mouth (e.g. “t, b, d, m, p”) versus consonants that are produced in the back of the mouth (e.g. “k” and “g”). Lastly, baby’s babbles will begin to sound more adult like in their delivery and timing.
10-12 months: Variegated babbling
During baby’s tenth, eleventh, and twelfth month, you can expect to hear more complex babbling called variegated babbling. Variegated babbling is when baby starts to combine different consonant and vowel combinations together (e.g. “dabogadi”). These productions will often time be produced with adult-like prosody (e.g. rising intonation at the end of a string of babbling to indicate a question). Baby will mostly like be using the following consonant sounds “h, d, b, m, t, g, s, w, n, k, j, p.”
These stages of language progression are foundational for baby to say their first word and start talking. If you have concerns about your baby’s speech and language development, ProActive is here to help your baby THRIVE!