The answer is rarely no when parents are asked the question “Is the baby making sounds?” But if it is, it’s important to try to find out what’s going on, according to a New York Times article.
“If a baby isn’t babbling normally, something may be interrupting what should be a critical chain: not enough words being said to the baby, a problem preventing the baby from hearing what’s said, or from processing those words, ” says article’s author and pediatrician Dr Perri Klass. In other words, there is “something wrong in the home, in the hearing or perhaps in the brain.”
According to Dr Klass, babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech, as well as for both cognitive and social emotional development. And research is looking into the phonetic components of babble, along with "the interplay of neurologic, cognitive and social factors."
To study babbling, researchers have begun to look at the social response – at the baby and the parent together. Experiments by Michael H. Goldstein, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, showed that babies learn better from parental stimulation if parents provide that stimulation in response to the baby’s babble. “In that moment of babbling, babies seem to be primed to take in more information,” Professor Goldstein said. “It’s about creating a social interaction where now you can learn new things.”