With the birth of a baby, a period of unforgettable events begins in the family.
One of these moments is when a child begins to make his first sounds: cooing, cooing.
But when the baby is a little delayed in pronouncing sounds, mom and dad begin to look for reasons and take some measures to make the baby speak.
Often, a child’s silence is due to various factors that have nothing to do with developmental delays.
At what months should a baby begin to make his first sounds: cooing, cooing? How to speed up the process of the appearance of cooing in a baby?
At what months do newborns make their first sounds?
For the first month of its life, a newborn does not make any sounds. He cries and grunts, which makes it clear to mom and dad that he needs something. The first ringing expressions of desires in the form of humming and cooing appear a little later. Walking is the first step towards communication, which can appear already in the second month of a baby’s life.
As experts note, children of all language groups initially make similar sounds. The easiest way for babies to make vowel sounds. The baby develops guttural speech, which is very similar to the crowing of a pigeon, hence this way of communication of the baby gets its name.
Having reached the age of three months, the baby is already able to pronounce the first “aha”. During this period, the child already begins to recognize close people, respond with a smile when they appear nearby, and also try to communicate with them using his first “aha.” Crying is an indicator of a child's adaptation to the environment. The approximate period for the baby to start “crying” is 1.2 – 2.5 months.
Attention! If the baby does not start walking before 4 months, his hearing or speech apparatus may be impaired. This is a reason to show the baby to the doctor.
How long can you walk with a newborn?
You shouldn't go outside for a long time right away. The first walk with a newborn should last no more than 15 minutes in the summer or in good weather in spring and autumn. In winter it is better to start with 5 minutes. Gradually increase the duration of your walks by 10–15 minutes.
Good to know
At first, your trips outside will be very short. You can spend more time rolling out and preparing the stroller, putting your baby in it, and then putting it back “in the parking lot” than on the walk itself. To solve this problem, temporarily abandon the stroller and take your baby outside in a sling.
Do not listen to advice that there is a minimum duration of walks that must be maintained. Walk as much as you feel comfortable! some mothers go out with their baby for only an hour, others take a couple of exercises a day for a total duration of three hours or more. Choose a mode that is convenient for you and your child.
In bad weather, walks with newborns can be moved from the street to the balcony. During the first few “walks”, do not leave your baby; later you can start leaving him alone on the balcony under the supervision of a baby monitor. When the child learns to roll over, walks on the balcony should be stopped - he may fall out of the stroller.
What is the difference between cooing and humming?
Humming and cooing are two stages in the development of the speech apparatus.
The first stage is walking. At this moment, the child pronounces drawn-out, singing-like vowel sounds “a”, “o”, “u”, “i”, “e” .
This period can last from two weeks to four months before the baby says his first “aha.”
After this, the baby suddenly adds several consonant sounds to his speech, which indicates a transition to the next stage of development of the speech apparatus.
The letters “x”, “k”, “g” help the baby coo.
Reference! Many kids often imitate singing while they are playing. Quiet songs with long vowels will come in handy more than ever for your baby during this period.
How does a child develop motor skills?
When a child begins to walk, at first he is still just finding his balance and walking on widely spaced legs. At first he may fall often, but over time he walks more and more confidently. At first, walking consists of continuous stops and falls, but then he will begin to stop and change direction. After about six months of training, the baby’s gait becomes more mature: he no longer puts his arms in front of him, but holds them at his sides. He places his legs closer to each other. Some children begin to walk more naturally at this time, placing the toe of one foot against the heel of the other.
What to do if the baby does not start to gurgle or coo?
The baby’s long silence is alarming, and the mother immediately begins to invite doctors to look for the reasons for the lack of noise. But you can try to fix everything yourself; it is important to follow some simple rules that will certainly encourage the baby to communicate:
- Communicate more with your baby. The more often he hears his native speech, the faster he will begin to pronounce sounds. Also find out when a newborn begins to hear.
Important! When communicating with a child, the emotional component is important. It is necessary to talk to him in a calm, measured tone.
- Gesticulation. Hand movements and finger games while talking with your baby will also encourage him to “get involved” in the conversation. Simple, familiar games “Soroka-Soroka”, “Ladushki” can be used from birth.
- Don't babysit. Many parents believe that while the child is still small, they can lisp and distort words with him, which they are very mistaken about.
Important! Clear, correct pronunciation of words will not only speed up the process of humming and cooing, but will also contribute to the possible early pronunciation of syllables, words and sentences.
- Development of hand motor skills. Fine and gross motor skills of a baby’s hands need to be given attention from birth. The nerve endings contained in the fingertips directly affect the development of speech.
- After the first humming begins, parents need to start repeating the sounds after the baby, gradually adding new letters. This will help move from humming to hooting.
What to do if the baby is silent
At what time do children start cooing and cooing is an individual question. If your child is already a month old and he is silent, there is no need to panic. When the baby is mature enough, he will definitely delight you with new sounds and syllables. Children, like adults, have different temperaments - some are talkative and noisy, others are quiet and silent. Love your child for who he is, and do not fit him into average parameters and norms.
If the baby is silent for too long, more than 8 months, you should contact a pediatric neurologist, otolaryngologist, defectologist and speech therapist.
What to do if the child stops walking? Everything was fine, everyone was delighted with the conversations with the baby, and suddenly - silence. The baby has stopped cooing, and most likely this means that he has calmed down before a developmental leap. Soon he will begin to chatter with renewed vigor, and new syllables, sounds, and laughter will be added to his existing arsenal. New achievements and periods in development tend to begin with a rollback; the child simply takes a break, accumulates the knowledge gained from communicating with you, and this is normal.
Other reasons why a talkative child might become silent are stress, neurological disorders or illness. Any disease pushes the baby’s development back. Observe him for any changes in his behavior and report any signs to your doctor. And don’t start panicking in advance, the child feels the mother’s excessive anxiety, and this prevents him from developing at the right rhythm.
Remember that your child is not a robot with a well-functioning system, but a living organism, with its own characteristics and secrets. When children begin to gurgle depends on many factors, even heredity and their inherent character. Don’t rush the time, the moment when children start to gurgle always comes. Soon your beloved child will begin to talk with all his might, and you will remember with emotion the anticipation of the first sounds.
How to teach a skill?
In order for your baby to start walking, it is important to perform simple exercises with him, thanks to which he will soon begin to make melodious, drawn-out sounds.
- Sing songs. Lullabies and calm children's songs will help the baby consolidate the experience of humming and begin to coo sooner. The combination of drawn-out vowels with admixtures of abrupt consonants is a strong stimulus for the development of the baby’s speech.
Reference! Today there are many drawling songs with the alphabet. Thanks to them, the child will learn to walk and already remember things necessary for a much later age.
- Get massages. Massaging the baby's palms and fingers, as well as the feet, will help him start talking sooner (you will also be interested to know when the baby starts talking). The nerve endings contained in the fingertips are directly related to the development of speech. You can start doing a light massage from the first days of the baby’s life, and at an older age (from 6 months), under the supervision of adults, you can let him play with cereals (beans, peas, millet, etc.), which is the best method for the development of small and gross motor skills.
- Read poems, fairy tales, nursery rhymes and other children's works. This will develop not only the baby’s speech, but also memory.
Gushing period (2-3 months - 5-6 months)
such innate vocal reactions as a short hum, and then a melodious hum, at first differ little from screams in terms of the necessary coordination of movements. high intensity - screams - are dominated by noise components (disphonation) and powerful vocalizations (hyperphonation), and in the same moderate intensity - hooting and humming - moderate in sonority, pitch, volume and power of vocalizations (phonation) predominate, which gives them a melodious timbre.
In behavioral situations of high subjective value (for example, in situations of hunger and abdominal pain), an infant, already producing sound complexes of humming, retains the ability to scream loudly and accompany his cry with sharp, erratic movements of his arms and legs.
By 2.5-3 months of life, communicatively and cognitively mediated comfortable states of the internal environment become the child’s need, a complex of revitalization - moderate movements of the limbs, head turns, gaze movements, smiles and vocalizations addressed to the mother. the components are inseparable from each other, syncretic: a child in the first months of life cannot make sounds outside of general motor activity, just as he cannot move his arms and legs, remaining silent.
A.N. Gvozdev characterized humming, in contrast to shouting, as “consonants that arise against the background of a sliding vowel and are phonetically poorly defined in terms of their place of formation
" For the most part, these consonant-like components of humming are of laryngeal-pharyngeal-posterior lingual origin, which is reflected in the terms “humming,” “cooing,” and “humming.” Consonant-like elements are usually palatalized, that is, they sound soft. There are deviations from the sound in the direction of vowels of the upper rise: ы, less often and, nasal sounds are frequent, rounded vocalizations are rare, among consonant type noises the sounds of posterior articulation predominate, very diverse in the method of formation, but the fricative nasal posterior lingual voiced sound dominates. Sometimes this sound is complicated by elements of an explosion. There is an abundance of noises such as affricates, there are grunting and snoring sounds, sounds caused by trembling of the velum palatine. There are practically no linguistic sounds. Labial sounds are presented only in the labiolabial variant: for the most part they are nasal and often softened.
Each of these sounds, which is the result of a complex synergy, can be stereotypically reproduced repeatedly through the mechanism of tactile-kinesthetic feedback. In the first autoecholalic phase of this period, auditory copies of tactile-kinesthetic images of humming are created, which make possible the transition to the second onomatopoeic phase. In this phase, universal emotional and expressive vowel timbres, characteristic of all children (without differences in their national and cultural affiliation), receive nationally specific polishing, and those of them, the equivalents of which are absent in maternal speech, are inhibited
. Thus, sound complexes of humming, carried out while inhaling, are inhibited without receiving reinforcement. However, in defensive behavioral complexes, voice formation continues to occur in both phases of the respiratory cycle.
The blossoming of the buzz falls at 4-6 months of life. Apparently, by this time the child has fully mastered the national specifics of the emotional and expressive vocalism of his native speech, which explains the following amazing fact: adult Americans, Danes and Chinese can recognize their compatriots among 6-month-old babies by the humming sounds they make.
As is known, vowel sounds are realized in speech in the form of various allophones, depending both on the position of the vowels in the word (positional allophones) and on the consonants adjacent to them (combinatorial allophones). The timbre of a vowel is most clearly revealed throughout its relatively stationary section, and since such sections characterize the timbres of the main positional allophones of vowels, then, apparently, the development of native vocalism begins precisely with them. By the way, such a feature of maternal speech as its melodiousness with emphasized emphasis on vowels of stressed syllables helps to clarify precisely the main allophones of vowels under stress. The timbres of these allophones [e, i, y, e, o, s] are of particular importance for the communication of emotional states.
To understand the further development of communicative and cognitive means, it is important to emphasize that in sound complexes of humming only vocalized areas have emotional meanings
.
The more or less noisy areas connecting them are emotionally insignificant. When perceiving the mother’s speech, the child in the same way takes into account only her vocalized parts, and he ignores everything that is between them. The period of humming ends with the child, on the verge of the first half of the year, beginning to recognize specific vowel timbres from unstressed syllables, in which they are merged with noise elements of the syllable
.
The transition to the perception of “difficult” noisy areas of maternal speech is associated with an increase in communicative-cognitive motivation and, consequently, activation of corresponding acts. From this we can conclude that during the period of mastering emotionally expressive vocalism, the child’s communicative and cognitive activity in general increases
.
The period of walking is observed in all children. Already at 1.5 months, and then at 2-3 months, the child exhibits vocal reactions in the reproduction of sounds such as a-a-bm-bm, blb, u-gu, boo, etc. It is these that later become the basis for the development of articulate speech. Humming (according to its phonetic characteristics) is the same among all children of the world.
At 4 months, sound combinations become more complex: new ones appear, such as gn-agn, la-ala, rn, etc. In the process of humming, the child seems to be playing with his articulatory apparatus, repeating the same sound several times, while enjoying it . A child gurgles when he is dry, well-rested, fed and healthy. If one of the relatives is nearby and begins to “talk” to the baby, he listens to the sounds with pleasure and seems to “pick up” them. Against the background of such positive emotional contact, the baby begins to imitate adults and tries to diversify his voice with expressive intonation.
To develop the skills of walking, teachers recommend to parents the so-called “visual communication”, during which the child peers at the adult’s facial expressions and tries to reproduce it. The famous Russian teacher O.I. Tikheyeva (1936) compares a child during the revelry period with a musician tuning his instrument*. In most cases, at the first manifestations of humming, his parents begin to talk to the baby. The child picks up the sounds he hears from the speech of adults and repeats them. In turn, the adult repeats the child’s “speech” reactions. Such mutual imitation contributes to the rapid development of increasingly complex pre-speech reactions of the child. Pre-speech reactions, as a rule, do not develop well enough in cases where, although the child is being trained, he cannot hear himself or the adult. For example, if there is loud music in the room, adults are talking to each other, or other children are making noise, the child will very soon fall silent. There is one more important condition for the normal development of pre-speech reactions: the child must clearly see the face of an adult, the movements of the organs of articulation of the person talking to him are accessible to perception.
According to a number of experimental studies (257, 347, 348, etc.), by the age of 6 months, the sounds pronounced by children begin to resemble the sounds of their native language. This was tested in the following psycholinguistic experiment. The subjects, who were native speakers of different languages (English, German, Spanish, Chinese), were presented with tape recordings of screaming, humming, “piping” and babbling of children brought up in the corresponding language environments. Only when listening to tape recordings of six-seven-month-old children were subjects able to recognize with a high degree of reliability the sounds of their native language (347, 348).
During the period of humming (voice-modulated pronunciation of individual sounds, corresponding in their characteristics to vowels), the sound side of children's speech is devoid of four important features inherent in speech sounds: a) correlation; b) “fixed” localization (“stable” articulation); c) constancy of articulatory positions (there is a large and largely random “scatter” of articulations); d) relevance, i.e. the correspondence of these articulations to the orthoepic (phonetic) norms of the native language
What does Dr. E. Komarovsky think about this?
We also recommend watching another video about at what age, as a rule, babies begin to coo:
The baby's humming and cooing are rapidly changing stages of development. To prevent these processes from becoming a disappointment for mothers and fathers, it is necessary to prepare from birth, wait for the baby’s first sounds and prepare the child for this. Simple exercises will push the baby to the first walk and “aha”. But the most important thing is to maintain emotional calm within the family and give the baby all the love and tenderness.
What time do children start walking?
Children often take their first steps at around one year of age. But some children start walking a little earlier or a little later, and this is completely normal. A small child cannot just pick up and go. During the first year of life, he develops muscles and acquires useful motor skills: he learns to roll over, crawl, sit, stand up and stand independently, and only then walk. That is why in the first year of life it is very important to play with the baby and put him on his tummy. These activities contribute to the development of motor skills, building confidence and independence in the baby. The child will need all this to start walking.
When a baby starts babbling
After six months, when the period of babbling begins, the infant’s speech is notable for the single-sounding syllables “ba”, “ta”, “ma”, “pa”. At six months, a child clearly distinguishes intonation, senses your mood, watches your facial expressions, and imitates the sounds of adults’ speech. Emotional sensitivity makes your communication active and versatile.
Only closer to 1 year, syllables will begin to be repeated and formed into simple words. By this time, the baby will have about 10 words in his everyday life, such as “dad”, “mom”, “baba”, “give”, etc. And then the verbal boom is just around the corner - after all, time flies quickly!
How to determine that your baby hears and understands you, but is silent
Babies often show no desire to communicate when they are feeling unwell. Lack of attention to the actions carried out by adults may be due to the fact that the baby is tired. It is possible to understand whether you have problems with hearing and concentration by conducting a simple test.
During normal development, the following reactions should be observed:
- at sharp sounds the baby shudders;
- a month-old baby turns his head towards the sound source, which is behind him;
- a four-month-old child reacts by moving his head towards a toy that sounds near him.
The baby, when communicating with an adult after the start of the party, actively helps himself by moving his legs and arms. When communicating with an adult, he expresses a complex of animation; emotions can cause squealing and laughter.
