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Now normally, when we think of babbling babies, we're talking human newborns. But Fernandez

was in the forest to prove something surprising. That these bat babies, babble in many of

the same ways humans do, despite a wide, evolutionary gap between us and them.

Babbling is a production milestone in human infant speech development, and it is characterised

by universal features. However, evidence for babbling in non-human mammals is scarce,

rendering cross-species comparisons difficult. We investigated a pop babbling behaviour

of wildsacopterxbilinata about capable of vocal imitation, to compare its features to

those that characterise human infant babbling.

The findings are published in the journal Science magazine. The Sackwing Bat is known

to be particularly laquacious, with a repertoire of 25 different syllable types. Fernandez

has been studying the species for six years. In previous work on their language, she and

her colleagues noticed the sometimes mothers spoke in a kind of pattern meant to get a response

from their pups. She calls it motheries. Basically, a kind of baby talk aimed at their pups

to guide them towards adult bat language. If you've ever been in front of a four-month

old, you yourself have probably uttered or heard someone speaking baby talk. Batmothers

it turns out do the same. Fernandez showed that these female Sackwing bats heighten the

pitch of their tomba and slow down their tempo to enable the pups to engage. In his current

research, after studying 20 of these babbling babies in Costa Rica and Panama, the researchers

identified eight speech precursors or protophones in the pups babbling, each are a parallel

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