From gurgling “goos” to squealing “wheees!”, the delightful symphony of sounds emanating from a baby’s crib may seem like charming gibberish to the untrained ear. However, a new study suggests that these adorable vocalizations are far more than just random noise — they’re actually a crucial stepping stone on the path to language development.
The research, published in PLOS One, took a deep dive into the vocal patterns of 130 typically developing infants over the course of their first year of life. Their discoveries challenge long-held assumptions about how babies learn to communicate.
Traditionally, many experts believed that infants start out making haphazard sounds, gradually progressing to more structured “baby talk” as they listen to and imitate the adults around them. This new study paints a different picture, one where babies are actively exploring and practicing different categories of sounds in what might be thought of as a precursor to speech.
Think of it like a baby’s very first music lesson. Just as a budding pianist might spend time practicing scales and chords, it seems infants devote chunks of their day to making specific types of sounds, almost as if they’re trying to perfect their technique.
The researchers reached this conclusion after sifting through an enormous trove of audio data captured by small recording devices worn by the babies as they went about their daily lives. In total, they analyzed over 1,100 daylong recordings, adding up to nearly 14,500 hours – or about 1.6 years – of audio.
Using special software to isolate the infant vocalizations, the research team categorized the sounds into three main types: squeals (high-pitched, often excited-sounding noises), growls (low-pitched, often “rumbly” sounds), and vowel-like utterances (which the researchers dubbed “vocants”).
Next, they zoomed in on five-minute segments from each recording, hunting for patterns in how these sound categories were distributed. The results were striking: 40% of the recordings showed significant “clustering” of squeals, with a similar percentage showing clustering of growls. In other words, the babies weren’t randomly mixing their sounds, but rather, they seemed to focus on one type at a time, practicing it intensively.