It’s no secret that babies make A LOT of noise.
But what they’re trying to say...that’s not always so clear.
From crying and babbling to baby’s first word, there are so many speech milestones during that first year of life.
And plenty we can do as caregivers to make sure that the development process goes as smoothly as possible!
But I can’t promise no crying.
Crying will happen.
When a baby is born, their vocal chords measure around 2.5 mm,
which is tiny compared to us adults.
When my oldest would sneeze, it sounded like a cartoon, it was NOT real sounding!
But those cries, the cries were a LOT louder.
So crying is a distress signal. But as you go across the first year, the frequency of crying tends to get even lower,
and it tends to get replaced with what we call whimpering.
So crying, you know, is whale crying (makes sound).
And whimpering is (makes sound).
These fit into kind of a package that often is coordinated.
They'll do both, they'll start with whimpering and then go into crying.
But babies are also making a lot of noises we hardly notice.
Sometimes they sound like transformers, sometimes they’re just bubbling,
I love ALL of it, I could listen to them all day,
especially since I learned those little noises have a name known as protophones.
So they produce squealing sounds of a very high pitch, they produce growling sounds that are very low pitch,
they produce lots of sounds in the middle, they produce loud sounds and quiet sounds, they whisper.
They even produce ingressive sounds sometimes.
What the baby is doing, I think, with all these protophones that they're producing,
is they’re exploring what we might call auditory objects, that they can control.
It's as if they're exploring everything that the vocal apparatus can do.
But then after the protophones and the crying— something magical happens: you hear a laugh!
Laughter doesn't really tend to occur until close to four months for most babies.
So there's a delay in its onset.
And when it does start, it's really, really, really infrequent.
It’s addictive!
Once they laugh you are chasing that laugh down.
Oh, oh, oh, you can laugh now?
I want you to laugh all of the time!
And then like, a couple months later...that laugh comes again.
If you've seen people playing peekaboo with a seven or eight-month-old who is really into the game,
you may see just peals of laughter from the baby every time the parent says peekaboo.
And it's just so enchanting.
I mean, the people watching YouTube videos of babies laughing like this can not inhibit their own laughter.
They have to laugh with the baby under normal circumstances.
But nearing the second half of a baby’s first year of life, something really amazing happens.
The noises they make start to sound closer to words.
Well, sort of.
This is the start of babbling.
The baby explores an awful lot of stuff in those first six months vocally.
The baby's mind is organizing itself with regard to the control of all of the things that are controllable vocally.
The first thing they learned to control is the phonatory system , so the vocal chords themselves.
They have to learn how to, you know, hold them tightly and create the right sublevel pressure, and then they start vibrating.
They need to sort of grasp how that can be done and the various modes in which it can be done.
That creates the source energy for what will ultimately be speech.
And OMG my twins were babbling so much!
They were just feeding off each other—
it really seemed like their climb to speech happened a lot faster than with my other kids.
At some point, after enough of that experience, I think something self organizes and suddenly,
they realize that ___ could be whaa___, and whaaat is a canonical syllable.
Of course, they're hearing things that are being said during that period also.
By the middle of the first year, we have pretty good evidence now that the babies have actually learned to recognize
a few words, and to associate them with objects.
For example, if it's a common word that the child has been hearing,
they may well tend to systematically look towards the object that has been named.
By 9 months, or before the first year is up,
most babies will have said their first word!
Mama was one of the first words for all my kids,
then Dada was right behind.
Then they learned ”no” and that became a little less fun.
Of course, not every baby develops at the same pace or meets language development milestones in the same way.
But no matter the baby, there are certain things we can do as caregivers to encourage their healthy development.
Like… baby talk!
I think the baby talk is a terrific thing to do.
Why it's a good thing to do, is actually kind of tricky.
Because it could be that the primary thing it does is not highlight the stuff the parent is saying,
but to just arouse the baby to engage in the interaction.
Personally, I would do it, whether I had any literature-based reason for doing it all
because I think the most important thing that happens between parents and their babies
is this sense of nurturance that gets developed.
The baby needs to know that she's being nurtured.
All the things that we want for our children are presented when we engage them playfully and joyfully.
Thank you for watching Seeker Baby!
I'm Angel Laketa Moore, and I hope you're learning as much about babies as I am.
If there's a baby topic you want us to cover, leave us a comment. And keep coming back to Seeker for more on babies.
See you next time!