What is babbling?
Babies make sounds from the moment they are born … crying, laughing, cooing and burping. Babies then move on to making strings of consonant and vowel sounds, such as “bababa” or “mamama”. This is called babble and it’s an essential step on the way to words and language. Babies learn how to start to move their mouths to make a range of different sounds.
Babies quickly learn that through sounds & noise, they can get someone’s attention. They learn how to try and respond when someone is speaking to them. They learn to make sounds in response to the things that they need/want or just to enjoy vocal play and turn taking with an adult. These are the first building blocks to conversation.
As babies learn words, babbling doesn’t just stop. They will still use babble and some words until they are fully able to get across what they want to say with words.
Here are some tips to try and encourage babbling.
- If your baby makes any sounds to you, copy them straight back and wait to see if your baby will vocalise again. By repeating the process … you’ll soon be having an early ‘conversation’ with your child.
- Pause and wait for your baby to babble – don’t be tempted to fill all the gaps with your own talking.
- Make babbling sounds yourself while you are interacting with your baby.
- Help them to explore different sounds, such as blowing raspberries and kisses … lip smacking and fake coughs and sneezes.
- Establishing and maintaining good eye contact is an important social skill. Looking at the face of the person who is speaking to you will give important added information about language, such as, facial expression, gesture and lip patterns.
- To encourage eye contact, always try to get down to your baby’s eye-level or bring them to your level when you speak to them.
- Use a higher pitched voice, with lots of intonation and animation.
- If you think your child is trying to tell you about something specific when she babbles, put her message into words. For example, if your child looks at a dog and says “bababa”, you could add to this by saying, “There’s a dog,” while you point to the dog yourself. By doing this, you are providing labels for the things she is trying to communicate about. This helps build vocabulary.
More than anything … have fun talking!
Lisa & Tracey x
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