Pre-verbal communication
Infants actively produce sounds from birth onwards. This follows an orderly 4 stage sequence over the first year of life.
Be aware:
Even hearing impaired babies babble, but this tends to decrease at age 8 to 9 months.
| Crying | From birth | Signals distress. |
| Cooing | Around 1 month | Angry Oo sounds that occur during social exchanges with care giver. The kinds of sounds made at each of the first 3 stages are quite similar across different languages. For example, young Chinese, American and Ethiopian babies all babble similar vowel-consonant combinations. |
| Babbling | Around 6 months | Strings of consonant-vowel combinations. Cultural differences in the prespeech sounds that babies make begin to emerge. It is as if the babies are starting to 'tune in' to the language they hear spoken around them. Usually by about 6 months an infant should be able to do the following:
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| Patterned speech | Around 1 year | Late babbling contains sounds very much like those that are used in early attempts to produce words. Strings of pseudo-words, made up of phonemes in first language or mother tongue that sound like words. |