Syllable structure of babbling in typically developing 6-to-12-month Persian-learning infants

Pre-linguistic vocalizations have great importance in speech and language development. The aim of this study is to examine the syllable structure and inventory of babbling in infants. Eight typically- developing 6 to 8-month Persian-learning infants (3 boys and 5 girls) participated in this 4-months longitudinal descriptive-analytic study. A weekly 30-60 minutes’ audio and video-recording were made at home from the spontaneous vocalizations of the infants. The vocalizations were phonetically broad transcribed by the researcher; 20% of them were rated by a speech-language pathologist as the second rater. The inter-rater reliability was obtained by Pearson coefficient, between 1 and 0.75 for consonants (p 0.02) and between 1 and 0.74 for vowels (p 0.01). The results show that the notable highest syllables belonged to /CV/ (25.61, SD: 36.22). According to the results of the highest mean of syllable structures, we may conclude that our findings were consistent with previous studies of development of babbling in other languages. It seems that the babbling patterns follow a universal development.