Deaf Babies Begin Babbling as All Babies Do Around 5 Months of Age, However They:
Babbling is a central stage in linguistic communication acquisition. Nosotros can see where it fits into the overall progression in the following "very rough" table taken from Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics:
| Linguistic communication stage | Beginning age |
| Crying | Birth |
| Cooing | vi weeks |
| Babbling | half dozen months |
| Intonation patterns | 8 months |
| 1-word utterances | 1 year |
| 2-word utterances | 18 months |
| Word inflections | 2 years |
| Questions, negatives | 2¼ years |
| Rare or complex constructions | five years |
| Mature speech communication | 10 years |
Afterwards the cooing or gurgling stage from which it develops, babbling has a distinctly speech-like quality considering information technology features "sounds that are chopped up rhythmically by oral articulations into syllable-like sequences", as Marking Liberman describes it.
The sounds most associated with blathering are mama, papa, dada, nana and slight variations thereon — as for instance in the well-known video of twin babies repeating dada (and dadadadada, etc.) to each other.
This is true of a great many languages from different language families and parts of the globe. The remarkable correspondence can be seen in a list included in Larry Trask's "Where do mama/papa words come from?", virtually which more below:
Before I knew anything near language conquering, I assumed that babies making these utterances were referring to their parents. But this interpretation is backwards: mama/papa words just happen to exist the easiest give-and-take-like sounds for babies to make. The sounds came first — equally experiments in vocalization — and parents adopted them as pet names for themselves.
If y'all open your mouth and make a sound, information technology will probably be an open vowel like /a/ unless you lot motion your tongue or lips. The easiest consonants are peradventure the bilabials /thou/, /p/, and /b/, requiring no movement of the tongue, followed by consonants made by raising the front of the natural language: /d/, /t/, and /n/. Add a dash of reduplication, and you become mama, papa, baba, dada, tata, nana.
That such words refer to people (typically parents or other guardians) is something nosotros take imposed on the sounds and incorporated into our languages and cultures; the meanings don't inhere in the sounds as uttered by babies, which are more likely calls for food or attention. The Clear Mammal includes an observation by Charles Darwin, that his son
made the swell pace forrard of inventing a word for food, namely, mum but what led him to it I did non discover.
So mama/papa words are a matter non of precocious word-learning but of the convenience of certain phonetic articulations. That, at whatever charge per unit, is the idea generally accepted by linguists.
An excellent essay by Larry Trask, "Where do mama/papa words come from?" (PDF), attributes to wishful thinking the inference that babies babble mama to mean female parent:
At the cooing stage, the kid is producing no recognizable spoken language sounds, and and then the parents do not suppose that the child is trying to speak. Withal, once the child moves on to the babbling stage, the eager parents of a sudden start hearing familiar speech sounds and recognizable syllables — and and so they at once conclude, delightedly, that little Jennifer is trying to speak.
Now, this conclusion is an error. . . . Babbling appears to be no more a way of experimenting with the vocal tract, and babbled sounds like mama and dada are not intended as meaningful utterances.
*
An ancestral globe language, dubbed "Proto-Globe", is sometimes proposed every bit an explanation for what gave ascension to the mamas and the papas. Trask demolishes this suggestion, showing decisively why information technology'southward not simply wrong but daft and impossible. His persuasive essay (PDF) is also a very interesting study in etymology and language change.
Both Trask and Aitchison refer to "Why 'mama' and 'papa'?" (1959), a paper written by Roman Jakobson in response to anthropologist George Murdock'south request for an caption of data Murdock had compiled of "nursery forms" in various countries. Co-ordinate to Jakobson, mama/papa words gave rise to our adult parental words female parent and male parent:
in Indo-European, the intellectualized parental designations mātēr and pətēr were built from the nursery forms with the help of the suffix –ter used for various kin terms.
These nursery forms, Jakobson wrote, "are based on the polarity between the optimal consonant and the optimal vowel". In that pleasing phrase you can hear the classy of Occam'due south razor.
From the mouths of blathering babes, then, mama and papa are not withal the terms of endearment nosotros might wish them to be. But by being recreated generation after generation, these simple babe sounds take had a profound influence on our near basic family unit words in languages around the world.
Updates:
A note from Arnold Zwicky'southward paper 'Mistakes' (1980) (PDF):
William Labov ('Denotation Structure' in Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon, Chicago Linguistic Society, 1978) has described in some detail the meanings associated with his daughter Jessie's first words. Mama was used at first to refer to Jessie's mother, male parent, whatsoever 1 of her three (teenaged) sisters, and her (teenaged) brother, but non to herself or to anyone outside her immediate family. A few months later, Jessie began to employ dada. By and then, mama was used but for her mother, but dada was at offset used for both her male parent and brother. A month afterwards, mama and dada were each existence used to refer to a unmarried person.
Tom Chivers has brief coverage of this at the Telegraph.
David Morris writes about the relevant Korean terms, 아빠, 아버지 et al., at his blog Never Pure and Rarely Simple.
Otto Jespersen'due south book Language: Its Nature, Evolution and Origin has several pages on this topic. Here'southward how the section begins:
In the nurseries of all countries a picayune comedy has in all ages been played – the baby lies and babbles his 'mamama' or 'amama' or 'papapa' or 'apapa' or 'bababa' or 'ababab' without associating the slightest meaning with his mouth-games, and his grown-up friends, in their joy over the precocious child, assign to these syllables a rational sense, accustomed as they are themselves to the fact of an uttered sound having a content, a thought, an idea, corresponding to it. So we get a whole class of words, distinguished by a simplicity of sound-formation – never ii consonants together, generally the same consonant repeated with an a between, oft too with an a at the finish – words
plant in many languages, oftentimes in unlike forms, but with essentially the same significant.First we accept words for 'mother.' It is very natural that the female parent who is greeted by her happy child with the sound 'mama' should take it as though the child were calling her 'mama,' and since she frequently comes to the cradle when she hears the sound, the kid himself does larn to use these syllables when he wants to call her. In this style they become a recognized word for the idea 'mother' – now with the stress on the first syllable, now on the second.
Source: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/the-mamas-the-papas-in-babies-babbling/
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