The Power of Babbling
& how to encourage it in your little one
Laura Burnham, Licensed Speech Therapist based in New York City
As a Speech Pathologist working with kids in New York City, parents often ask me: How do I get my baby to start talking?
There are many research-backed approaches that have been proven to help get babies and toddlers to start talking. Clinical research show us consistently that the two biggest two predictors of when a baby or toddler will start talking are:
Gesture Use
Babbling
You might be thinking—isn’t babbling just random, incoherent sounds? Aren’t babies just playing around with sounds when they’re babbling?
Yes and no.
It’s true, your baby is playing with sounds when they are babbling and are they not saying real words. However, babbling is so much more than just nonsense sounds. It is a crucial piece to speech and language development as it allows your baby to practice coordinating the subsystems of speech that’s needed for talking.
Speech is a complex physical process that requires coordination of over 100 muscles in the body. Babies and toddlers babble all the time to learn how to coordinate these muscles effectively. Speech also requires fine motor movement which, again, requires lots of practice to master. Babbling, thankfully, provides this necessary practice.
As adults, saying speech sounds feels easy. It’s something we do without thinking and without any real effort on our part. But babies have not had the years of experience and practice with speech patterns and muscle coordination that we have had. This includes: relaxing the diaphragm to control the airflow up to the voice box (larynx) where vocal fold muscles start engaging. Airflow is then moved higher up the body in a controlled way to the oral and nasal cavity. Here the muscles of the tongue, lips, jaw, and soft palate are all working together to create motor patterns to produce clear, specific speech sounds.
This is a complex process that happens all at once when we speak. Therefore, babies need to practice it a lot.
We as adults can support and facilitate babbling and therefore speech development by:
Saying simple sounds that are at your baby’s level
This is one of my favorite ways to encourage babbling. I especially like using animal sounds and mini animal puppets to grab the baby’s attention and show them how I am making the sound. Most animal sounds are developmentally appropriate for babies because they are sounds that babies are able say (e.g., bah bah, moo moo). Keep in mind some animal sounds will be too challenging for babies (e.g., quack quack) as their oral cavity is not quite mature enough to make the sounds accurately, making babies will be less likely to copy or try it out.
Copying your baby’s babbling
This is a great strategy for encouraging babbling. When we copy back a baby’s vocalization, we are validating their babble and bringing attention to their vocalization thereby encouraging them to make more sounds. You may even find that you are having a “babble conversation” with your baby where you and your baby are taking turns vocalizing back and forth, mimicking the cadence of a real conversation. This is ideal as it stretches out the babbling as well as the engagement for your baby. We can also insert simple words that are sound close to the babble as again, this is right at the baby’s level.
Expanding on your baby’s babbling
When a baby babbles a sound (e.g. “ba”) we want to try bumping them up to the next level of babble, by adding on 1-2 sounds (e.g. ba-ba, ba-ma). When we add on 1-2 sounds to what they say we are modeling or showing them how to expand their babbles to new speech sounds. This is a great strategy to expand and help them grow their sound repertoire to increasingly complex strings of sounds and babbles. Again, using real words whenever possible will further help bump up their speech and language development.
There’s no question about it — babbling is powerful, crucial piece to your baby or toddler’s speech and language development. As their speech subsystems grow and mature, their muscles become more coordinated (this happens alongside feeding development) and their babbling also matures and grows. You’ll hear longer strings of babble with more and more sounds and eventually real, meaningful words.
There are several other skills that need to be mastered alongside babbling first before meaningful words emerge. That’s because speech and language is neurologically-based so several other concepts and skills must be developed for real words to come. For more on this, stay tuned for the next weekly roundup. If you found this helpful or insightful, please share with a parent friend
Laura is a licensed Speech-La.nguage Pathologist based in Brooklyn in New York City. She sees clients in-person in NYC and also offers virtual parent consultations.
Please note, this is never meant to be taken as medical advice. If you are having concerns about your child’s speech and language development, you should consult with your pediatrician and a licensed pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist.
References:
McGillion, M., Herbert, J.S., Pine, J., Vihman, M., dePaolis, R., Keren-Portnoy, T., & Matthews, D. (2017). What Paves the Way to Conventional Language? The Predictive Value of Babble, Pointing, and Socioeconomic Status. Child Development, 88(1), 156-166.
Franklin, B., Warlaumont, A. S., Messinger, D., Bene, E., Iyer, S. N., Lee, C., Lambert, B. & Oller, D. K. (2014). Effects of Parental Interaction on Infant Vocalization Rate, Variability and Vocal Type. Language, Learning and Development, 10(3): 279–296.
