Viral video of babbling twin babies has experts talking
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2011 (5610 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
They may be in diapers, but two baby boys that have taken YouTube by storm appear to be very deep in grownup conversation.
Fraternal twin brothers Sam and Ren, now 18 months old, sound more like they’re bantering than babbling, responding to each other with head nods, bursts of laughter and emphatic hand gestures in YouTube’s latest viral video, which has gotten more than 6 million hits since it was posted on Valentine’s Day.
But while the tots seem immersed in lively debate — a heated back and forth of indecipherable dah dah dahs — experts are tossing around another question: are these babies actually talking to each other?
Short answer? Probably not. But it’s still fun to watch.
ABC News reported that 40 per cent of twins develop what seems to be their own language. However, rather than producing words, young children are simply mimicking sounds and intonations they hear in real conversations.
“Even before they have words, they know how conversation works,” Dr. Roberta Golinkoff, education professor and director of the infant language project at the University of Delaware in Newark, told ABC.
“They’re producing syllables emphatically and using them for communication purposes,” she said. “They’re having a ball.”
And while the twins’ gibberish may not exactly translate into a secret baby language, the video captures an excellent moment of development as young children realize their ability to communicate, said Karen Thorpe, professor at the Queensland University of Technology’s School of Psychology and Counseling in Queensland, Australia.
“Babies are wired for communication from the start and we see here a fine example of how sophisticated and beautiful communication in even young children can be,” she told ABC.
See the video at winnipegfreepress.com.
— New York Daily News
