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Language Development & Communication
Promoting Communicating & Speaking
WiseTip: LD-COM-M0003-P01B

Respond to your baby’s cooing and babbling. Converse with them as if they understand everything you are saying.

1, 2

  1. New Jersey Birth to Three Early Learning Standards. (2013). New Jersey Council for Young Children.

  2. Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J.A. (2008) Social feedback to infants’ babbling facilitates rapid phonological learning. Psychol Sci 19:515–523.

0-3 months
Play
WHY IT MATTERS

Preverbal infants can engage in

protoconversations

Protoconversations - In protoconversation, adults conversed with the preverbal infants, and infants responded by making eye contact, cooing, smiling, showing lip and tongue movements or waving arms. The exchanges of ‘conversations’ between an adult and the infant enable the learning of social aspects of communication by engaging in turn-taking behaviour in protoconversations.1

1. California Department of Education. (2012). California Infant/Toddler Curriculum Framework.

with adults. Adults who observe and respond positively within appropriate timing to the infants’ protoconversations while playing encourage them to communicate willingly. Evidence shows that caregivers' speech to babbling infants provides crucial, real-time guidance to the development of their prelinguistic vocalizations.
1, 2

  1. Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J.A. (2008) Social feedback to infants’ babbling facilitates rapid phonological learning. Psychol Sci 19:515–523.

  2. Morgan, L., & Wren, Y. E. (2018). A Systematic Review of the Literature on Early Vocalizations and Babbling Patterns in Young Children. Communication Disorders Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525740118760215

In an experiment with 60 nine and a half month-old infants, mothers of the infants were instructed to provide models of vocal production timed to be either contingent or noncontingent on their infants' babbling. Infants given contingent (immediate response to babbling) feedback rapidly restructured their babbling, incorporating phonological patterns from caregivers' speech. However, infants given noncontingent (non-immediate) feedback did not, showing that preverbal infants learned new vocal forms by discovering phonological (sound structure) patterns in their mothers' contingent speech and then generalising from these patterns to create more sounds to communicate.

1
  1. Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J.A. (2008) Social feedback to infants’ babbling facilitates rapid phonological learning. Psychol Sci 19:515–523.