Frames, then content (FC) hypothesisNon-meaningful sound sequences produced by infants, especially sequences of consonants and vowels that typically appear between 6 and 10 months of age. At first, babbling is relatively unformed. It begins around 5 to 7 months of age, when a infant’s vocalisations start to appear as consonant-vowel combinations called canonical syllables, some of which are repetitive (e.g. “baaa”, “dada dada”, “goo”). Hence, it is referred to as a canonical or reduplicated babbling. Later, the infant makes use of repetition and variation of adult sounds in forms such as “bagadig”. There are two competing theories about the functional significance of babbling. In the theory by the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) appearing in 1968, while the child’s babbling produces almost the full range of possible human speech sounds, it is random and therefore distinct from speech. In contrast, according to the continuity theory of Kim Oller and colleagues (1975), babbling reflects the same substitution and deletion processes appearing in first words (viz., initial stops are more frequent than fricatives and affricates; single consonants rather than clusters).
See Alert wakefulness, Babbling drift, Cooing, Consonants, Frames, then content (FC) hypothesis, Fricative, Lingua-alveolar (or alveolar), Phoneme, Reflexive (vegetative) vocalizations, Speech development, Vowel-to-consonant ratio, Vowels