Some of you will have seen these videos already: Sam and Ren, fraternal twins, engaged in a conversation of very animated babbling. Regardless of your tolerance for cute-baby videos, the chat is great fun and quite fascinating to watch — especially the second video, which has been watched many millions of times in just a few weeks:.
As Mark Liberman writes in a comment at Language Log ,. It seems unlikely that material as phonetically unmodulated as this recording actually contains any communicated lexical material as opposed to acting out conversational interaction without any propositional content.
They deploy all sorts of conversational skills, and the fact that they are twins means each has a peer at a similar level of development with whom he can practise. Many of their vocalisations take the form of reduplicated or reduplicative babbling e.
There is fantastic rise and fall to their pitch and tones. Sentences or exclamations end loudly and emphatically, and there is also some questioning rising intonation. They are using gestures to supplement their talking, much like adults do. Their body distance is even very appropriate for most Americans; not too close, but not too far either. Or not so simple. It may very well be that they are simply mimicking the entire behavior — intonation pattern, gestures, and turn-taking — and gaining an understanding that these actions and sounds produce certain results or behaviors when these large, lumbering adult creatures in the house perform them, and maybe they should learn to do the same.
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