From birth, human infants' vocal structure is similar to other primate infants with a short vocal tract and higher larynx than adults. For speech to occur, the vocal tract needs to mature and the larynx must drop to enable consonant-vowel combinations. Infants progress through many stages of communication, the first of these stages is what is known as babbling. Much research has concluded that babbling is the stage of language development where infants produce speech sounds arranged in nonsensical combinations such as mamma or dada.
Prior to this, infants in their pre-babbling stage produce arbitrary vocalizations whereby they are limited to cooing using single-syllable vowels such as E and A. However, once they reach the six-month mark, around the same time their larynx lowers, infants learn to control their facial and tongue muscles which allows them to develop language-specific phonology and produce consonant vowels such as "ba" and "ga". Although this is all done without any meaning, babies have no intentions with the sounds they make.
During the early stages of babbling, infants create sounds that are universally similar regardless of cultural background. For example, babies from English-speaking backgrounds are able to make sounds that resemble African clicks. Over time, there is a babbling drift and their vocalizations become m...
