Before babies could spell and utter their first word, they usually talk in the special way that babies do, which is babbling. With babbling, the babies are actually beginning to practice their voice box, mouth, breathing, and tongue to produce sounds.
This initial exercise certainly helps babies to be able to speak then because speaking and speech skills are very complicated to do, in speaking, not only making sounds randomly that we need, but also we need the coordination between muscles in the mouth, our tongue and its movement, voice box, articulation, breathing, resonance, and even a voice tone.
So, when should and how is the growth of the baby babbling stages? Let’s find out by reading what we know about it.
The evolution stages of a baby’s babbling are generally corresponding with this list of predictable stages. However, if we find that the baby’s development is not suitable with their age and lagging or left behind, it is better for us to have a consult with a pediatric speech-language pathologist for additional direction.
1. Crying and Cooing: Birth – 2 months
From birth to two months, your baby is mostly crying and making reflexive sounds as when they are hungry, sleepy, or having an uncomfortable situation. During this stage, the baby will also begins to produce sounds that require their voice box to flutters and vibrates.
2. Simple Sound: 2 – 4 months
Babies will begin to learn how to coordinate their lips and tongue. This can be seen as the baby is doing what is called cooing and going, which are “kuhh, guhh, huhh, and oo” sounds mixed together.
Babies also begin to integrate the way they communicate by giving you a sign that they direct some object, you, or something that they see and point out. Captivating them by talking back and giving eye contact could encourage them to talk more.
3. First Babbles of Single-Syllable Sounds: 5 month
During this stage, babies will begin their simple babbling that started with single-syllable speech sounds, such as “ba, da, ma, pa” with this speech that the baby present, they are actually experimenting with their tone, pitch, and intensity of their own voice. This can also be indicated by when they started to squeal, growl, and yell.
4. Reduplicated Babbling: 6 -7 month
As the babies begin to babbling single syllables before, they develop their speech by reduplicating their babbling. So it will sound like “ma-ma”, “ba-ba”, “da-da”, “na-na”, or any other simple babbling.
At this rate, babies don’t actually know what is the meaning of what they said either. Other than the improvement of articulation and speech, they would also show facial expressions as they tried to communicate.
For the late part of this segment, their coordination and control of mouth and voice box could produce more clear articulation and also more defined sound.
5. Variegated Babbling: 8 – 11 month
From eight to nine months of the baby’s age, their babbling will commence to be variated, or blends a lot of different voices, such as “ba bi oop be da be”. Babies are also able to identify the sounds of objects or animals and sometimes imitate those noises, like when the bells rang or someone knocks on the door they will try to produce sounds close to that. Or even showing their excitement when they saw their favorite pets.
At this month’s age of babies, they also begin to understand and do something to express their feelings such as shaking their head, saying ‘no’ or ‘yes’, nod their head, and being excited about something that they want and they like.
And for the communication or conversation aspects, they could use tone in their babbling just like how conversational rhythm, make some gestures, and show a lot more facial expressions.
6. First Words: 12 month
Finally, for about this month, you will hear the baby’s first word! although their pronunciation and spelling might be far from correct, however, that’s completely okay. But aside from that, they actually understand what we tell and what they said to us.
There are a few things that the parents would do to helps the development of the baby’s speech, that are:
- Let babies eat more solid food to train their oral muscle
- Being responsive to your baby’s babbling
- Teach them the complicated word spelling
- Build a conversation with them and be expressive.