HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Mother’s Attentiveness to Baby’s Babbling Speeds Language

Those of you who have young infants will be familiar with the babbling sounds they like to make. But how do you respond? A new study from The University of Iowa and Indiana University published, in the journal Infancy, suggests that how parents react to their infants' prattling may influence their language development. Infants whose parents are attentive to their babbling sounds have greater advancement in language development, according to researchers. The study found that when mothers made an effort to respond to what they believed their infant was trying to say, their baby showed greater advancement in language development. In detail, they made more advanced consonant-vowel sounds, meaning their babbling started to sound more like words. In addition, these infants began to direct more of their babbling toward their mothers as time elapsed. The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative.