As mums it can be a little heartbreaking when your baby’s first word is Da-da, but new research has explained why this is, and made us feel a lot better in the process.
According to a new study, just because your baby says Da-da doesn’t necessarily mean they are calling their dad – they just like the sound of their own voice!
Professor Mary Fagan of the University of Missouri-Columbia and her team analysed the noises of 16 infants with profound hearing loss before and after they received cochlear implants, compared with those of 27 healthy controls. Before receiving the implants, the babies produced few vocalisations like 'ba-ba' or 'da-da.'
However, within a few months the number of babies and the number of vocalisations containing repetitive syllables and repetitions in a string such as 'ba-ba-ba-ba-ba' increased.
The research published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology shows the noises are mainly inspired by being able to hear themselves. Additionally, after being fitted with the hearing aids they soon babbled as often as their healthy peers, allowing them to catch up developmentally.
Earlier research has also shown there are constraints on the sounds babies can produce because of the structure of their mouth and their limited motor control.
This means D happens to be one of the first sounds babies can produce, before M.
Professor Fagan says when babies are born their tongues are fairly large in proportion to the mouth, which helps babies nurse, so the tongue has very little range of movement.
The early sounds they produce at three months are usually G sounds. As they grow they can make the sound D; so in the first three months the first sounds are usually K, G and D. By six months it's usually T, D and N because they involve the tongue tip.
Then at nine months it's P and B which involve the lips. All of these sounds just involve a small closure and release.
The M requires sustained closure to hold the lips closed, so that sound often comes along a little later.
We don't feel so bad anymore!
