Linguistic past could be rooted in baby talk Earliest forms of language may have come from infants' babble, U.S. researchers say

MAGGIE FOX Reuters News Agency Friday, April 21, 2000

Washington -- Babies may have invented the very earliest forms of language with their babble, and listening to them coo may open a window into the distant linguistic past, researchers say.

Some of the most persistent sounds in languages happen to be very easy for babies to make, and that is no accident, Peter MacNeilage and Barbara Davis of the University of Texas found.

Mr. MacNeilage and Ms. Davis studied the babbling of babies around the world and found universal patterns, then compared them to the structure of a group of proto words, which linguists believe could be words from extinct languages.

The two researchers found the same patterns.

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