Researchers find the real meaning of baby babble, and it's even more meaningless than we suspected

Your baby probably isn't babbling away to show how much it loves you — a new study suggests infants babble mostly because they like the sound of their own voices.

"Da-da" and "ba-ba" are popular first words for babies, as they tend to babble sounds with consonant-vowel repetitions. 

However, new research notes these repetitive sounds aren't common among infants with profound hearing loss until they receive cochlear implants, suggesting your bub's first foray into language may just be them testing their vocals out on themselves.

The University of Missouri study set out to investigate the motivations behind repetitive babbling in both hearing infants and those with profound hearing loss.

Researchers monitored the language development of 27 hearing and 16 non-hearing infants.

The data revealed that repetitive vocalisations before receiving a cochlear implant were rare, but four months after receiving the implant, the infants babbled as much their hearing peers.

"Hearing is a critical aspect of infants' motivation to make early sounds," Mary Fagan, assistant professor of communication science and disorders in the MU School of Health Professions, said in a media release.

"The fact that they attend to and learn from their own behaviours, especially in speech, highlights how infants' own experiences help their language, social and cognitive development."

Although the babble is meaningless in a communicatory sense, Fagan said babies are motivated to produce the sounds so they can hear their own voices, and so babble is "functional" in some way. 

She reasoned that babble shows babies are "actively engaged in their own developmental process" and that just because infants enjoy the sound of their own voices doesn't mean parents should talk to them less.

"This research doesn't diminish the importance of the speech that babies hear from others — we know they need to learn from others — but it raises our awareness that infants are not just passive recipients of what others say to them," she said.

Fagan added her study suggests that, if parents of infants with hearing loss do choose a cochlear implant, it's better to get one "sooner" rather than later.