Is babbling a part of language acquisiton, or is it simply 'mouth Essay

Is babbling a part of language acquisiton, or is it simply 'mouth play' - Essay Example The sounds produced during babbling indicate that the infant is trying to communicate his emerging thought pattern and is trying to talk like adults (Oller 2000). Even though words and sentences are not part of infant babble, the sounds in babbling indicate that the infants are making effort to achieve the â€Å"level of human understanding that only language seems to provide† (Oller 2000). It has been found that the world over, the first word that children usually learn are the names of their father and mother (O’Grady 2005). Infants use the sound ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ to refer to their mother and father respectively (O’Grady 2005). Also, as words like ‘mama’, ‘dada’ and ‘papa’ are easy to pronounce, they are used by infants to indicate that they want something to be done (O’Grady 2005). For example, the infants use the sound ‘mama’ when they want to be picked, when they are hungry or when they are not feeling comfortable (O’Grady 2005). Infants use different sounds in babbling to convey different messages to their parents. The emotional bond between the parents and their infants is so strong that the parents intuitively understand the messages hidden in different sounds in babbling. They help their children to assign meaning to different noises by using these sounds themselves while talking to their children (O’Grady 2005). For example, children are taught that ‘mama’ means mother and ‘papa’ means father (O’Grady 2005). After some time, infants learn to use babbling correctly by using different sounds to mean different things (O’Grady 2005). In this way, babbling is the ‘language’ through which infants communicate with their parents. A child starts producing the cooing noises and speech-like sounds at the age of two to three months (O’Grady 2005). By the age of about 6 months, the speech-like sounds are fully