Child Babble, or a Critical Component of Language Development?

Although children learning to speak may be a beautiful experience in the home, it inspires hot debate among psychologists studying it. Scientifically, babble is described as a "repetitive activity in which mandibular depressions alternate with elevations that briefly narrow the vocal tract, the specific points of obstruction being determined by the tongue and the lips" (Locke 1995). In other words, babbling is making sounds like "bababa". However, scientists are still not entirely sure why we babble. Psychologists studying the phenomenon of babble have staked out two main positions in explaining the phenomenon.

The first group, the "motorists" as I shall call them, attributes this special ability to recently developed motor control of the mouth. The motorist hypothesis posits that babbling is a left brain activity, controlled by developing motor skills that the new infant is testing out. Most significantly, this theory understands language to be a coincidental outgrowth of babble rather than present throughout the babble-to-language maturation (Petitto 2004).

The other group, the "babblinguists" as I shall happily name them, takes an almost polar opposite view. The babblinguists understand babble to be a fundamentally lingual activity: controlled by the right side of the brain, communicative in intent. They believe that babbling is a tool for babies to use to figure out all the syllables of their home language. This is in contrast to the motorist theory, which states that babbling is simply basic motor exploration: to babblinguists, babbling is for a targeted purpose, and that purpose is language (Petitto 2004).