Cross-linguistic Patterns in Infant Babbling

Infants begin to vocalize very soon after birth, and they begin to babble about six months after they are born (Oller, 1980). The babbling stage is distinct from the previous phase of vocalizations in that sounds – or gestures in infants acquiring sign language – are now clearly organized in a syllabic structure. As such, these utterances are the infant’s first linguistic productions. In the works of Stark (1980) and Oller (1980), two stages were identified within the babbling phase. Babies start with reduplicated babbling when they are six to eight months old, and progress into “variegated” (Oller, 1980) or “nonreduplicated” (Stark, 1980) babbling at 10 to 12 months. Work by Koopmansvan Beinum and van der Stelt (1986) outlines a similar line of development, with reduplicated babbling beginning at six months and lasting up until at least 12 months. They do not identify a specific non-reduplicated stage during this period. In addition, Roug, Landberg, and Lundberg (1989) also identified babbling stages similar to those proposed by Oller and Stark, with reduplicated (consonant) babbling beginning at seven months, and variegated babbling beginning at 12 months. The stages identified by these researchers differ only slightly. Where they crucially converge is on the consensus that infants begin their babbling at around six to eight months old, that they begin with reduplicated utterances, and that they transition into producing variegated utterances at around 10 to 12 months. The existence of these two stages has been disseminated in introductory linguistics textbooks for years (e.g., Hoff, 2008). Yet, the data on which these particular stages have been based came from relatively small-scale studies and from primarily English-acquiring infants. In the past decades, some studies have focused on finding out whether the proposed stages still hold when data from a larger number of infants is taken