There is a link between your infant’s babbling and the development of early gesture.

This episode of Learn With Less focuses on this topic – and Ayelet gives you ideas to use musical experiences with your babbling baby to develop the sense of “vocal play” that results in experimentation, play and – ultimately – language! 

Below is the transcript of this episode’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode.

For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode. 

On the last episode of Learn With Less,  (Communication, The First 6 Months), we talked about the typical development of infant communication within the first 6 months of life, and we ended our conversation with the topic of babbling, or the sounds your baby makes with his mouth that combine both a consonant and vowel – like “bababababa.”

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What the Research Suggests

There’s some interesting research to suggest that rhythmic arm movements (like banging) increase substantially around the same time as the onset of babbling, and that there is a definitive relationship between infant gesture and the acquisition of spoken language. 

We already know that gesture is one very clear form of non-verbal communication. Today we sang a song that made use of gestures, both representational (like waving, which represents a greeting) and referential (like pointing, which helps us refer to something being pointed at), as well as traditional or personal “signs” – hand movements or motions which can represent a specific word, thought or idea.

Gestures and Sign Language

You are welcome to use whatever hand signal or representational sign that works within your family. When you watch my video, you can see the gestures I use, which are adaptations of signs from American Sign Language.

You may have questions about using signs with a child who is not deaf or hard-of-hearing – I’ll focus more in depth on that topic in a future episode, but for now, I’ll mention that there has been a lot of research on this, and the consensus is that a young child will use the most efficient, effective, and easiest form of communication presented to them.

If your child is accustomed to hearing English (or any other verbal language) as his primary language, then when he can speak, he will! Signing can be considered a form of gesture (a very specific representational gesture), and, again, gestures often develop before speech.

Remember that most children are starting to babble around the same time as  they start to experiment with movements of their arms (such as banging a drum) – this is a good way of thinking about how precise their movements are – and how much more precise these movements will need to be to sequence all the sounds in a word.

But all of this is a progression of ability – first we see larger, less refined movements, like banging, or sweeping with the hand to move an item from one place to another, or babbling with a simple consonant-vowel combination… and then those eventually turn into more precise movements and sequencing of movements –...