A baby’s first “gugú gagá” is not mucus. Apart from being an event celebrated by the whole family, these first “protowords” are a milestone that marks the beginning of babbling, a key stage in human language learning. From the first two or three months of life, babies begin to try to imitate adult speech, emitting a great variety of unintelligible vocalizations (for some more than others), but with a sound similar to that of the words that arrive to your ears.
According to University of St Andrews interdisciplinary bat researcher Sonja Vernes, “babbling is meant to be this really important phase of development that we have to go through as humans on the way to speech.”
Well, it turns out that as often happens, humans are not as unique as we think and babbling could exist in other life forms as well. Although at the moment the evidence of this behavior is scarce in non-human mammals, the scientist Ahana Fernández focused her doctorate on studying in detail the offspring of the white-lined bat or sack bat ( Saccopteryx bilineata ), amates of a vocal game, flashy and loud, they consistently produce.
According to the researcher, the vocal repertoire of this species of adult bats includes 25 different syllables, which are defined as a sound interspersed with silence. These are syllables that are combined in complex “songs” for mating and defending the territory, as well as communication between a mother and her cubs. At the time of weaning, none of the puppies has mastered the 25 syllables, a knowledge that according to Fernández they could acquire as they grow. While they are with their mothers, the vocal sequence produced by the young is very different from that of the adults. The little ones babble with a long and multisyllabic sequence, averaging seven minutes, in which they imitate their relatives. Something that does not occur in many known bat species.
The importance of finding evidence of babbling in bats is a fact that suggests that vocal learning may have similar specific mechanisms in a wide range of mammalian species. Furthermore, human and bat babbling have many aspects in common, including the striking characteristics of reduplication and rhythmicity, we both produce them with the same organ and we could say that we have a similar mental structure. Finally, it could be said that this study could be very useful in order to study the development of cognitive mechanisms in different species and, ultimately, the evolution of language in different living beings. According to Fernández, “I think we can learn a lot about our own language by investigating the biological foundations of language in other species,” he tells The Scientist magazine.
References:
Fernandez, A. A., Burchardt, L. S., Nagy, M., & Knörnschild, M. (2021). Babbling in a vocal learning bat resembles human infant babbling. Science, 373(6557), 923–926. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abf9279
Melchor, A. (2021, October 7). Baby Talk: Bat Pups Babble Like Human Infants. The Scientist Magazine®. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/baby-talk-bat-pups-babble-like-human-infants-69114
