Babies group together their squeals and growls to prepare for speech

Babies seem to cluster together their squeals and growling noises, rather than making them sporadically, which suggests they are part of their preparation for talking.

The growls and squeals babies make before they start babbling may not be random noises, but the basic building blocks of speech development. Starting in the first month of life, babies create these noises in clusters, not sporadically, which suggests they are “practising” before learning to talk.

“Our findings reveal that infants engage in practice with various vocal types from the earliest months of life… laying a foundation for further language development,” says HyunJoo Yoo at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Previous studies have examined the babbling babies make from around 5 to 7 months old, says Yoo. However, the three most common kinds of more basic infant vocalisations – squeals, growls and medium-pitch vowel-like noises called vocants – have rarely been investigated.
To learn more, Yoo and her colleagues asked the parents of 130 babies – 71 boys and 59 girls, who all appeared to be developing as normal and lived in or around Atlanta, Georgia – to place small voice recorders in the pockets of the infants’ clothing for 16 hours per day, once a month for the first two years after birth.