o be a critical step in eventual vocalization, allowing the child to begin to refine the sounds that will be needed to begin to communicate. John H. Flavell and his colleagues (1993) note that between ten and twelve months the infant's babbling begins to change and the child starts to speak a few words; research, they observe, "suggests that children first use language for expression more than for getting things done in the world" (p. 287).
MacWhinney (1998) notes that babbling is a critical transition to the beginnings of vocal speech, as children learn which sounds will be most useful to them and which to discard: "In effect, children spend much of the first year of life losing the ability to make contrasts that are not used in the speech they hear about them" (p. 200). Although they are not yet ready to build an understanding of more than one language, they are already getting rid of some of the innate skills that might otherwise facilitate their ability to speak languages that are radically different from their native language.
As children begin to use simple words and build a small vocabulary, they are strongly influenced by the most significant sounds around them. MacWhinney (1998) writes, "Infants tend to prefer sounds produced by their own mothers to those produced by other women . . . They also prefer their native languages to other languages" (pp. 200-201). At this early stage, they find it easiest to focus on one language and one vocabulary: "The tendency to avoid learning two names for the same object emerges naturally from the competition . . . between closely related lexical items" (p. 202). By 14 months, children are usually beginni
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