system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do babies say double-syllable words like "mama" and "dada" when one syllable would seemingly be easier?
gpt
It depends on what stage of language development the kid is at. 

As children age, they go through distinct stages of learning, and they acquire the ability to recognize, and later produce, words of increasing phonetic complexity. 

For example, it's easier for a child to say a 'd' sound than it is to say a 'th' sound. It's easier for a child to say something like 'see' than it is for a child to say 'spree', or 'seat' or 'street'. Often, a child can easily HEAR the difference between a word like 'see' and 'seat' but the child can only say 'see' for both cases. 

Invariably, the ability to comprehend words of a given complexity exceeds the ability to pronounce them. Repeating a syllable 'like mama' is often a way for the child to approximate a word that has more than one syllable, like 'mother'-- They can get the first part down pat, but saying the whole thing is often a bit too tricky, so they say the first part twice-- this is called 'reduplication', and it shows that the child has awareness of the syllable structure of a word, but doesn't yet have the ability to properly articulate it yet. (it's also easier to say 'mama' than it is to say 'mommy' (two different vowel sounds in the second word))

Kids can also reduplicate because adults find it cute and give them attention when they do it. Search for 'child language acquisition' for more info!. 

Hope this helps! Back to thesis writing. 


EDIT: a bit late on this one, but it seems some people are getting hung up on the example 'mama' for 'mother'-- It's kind of a bad example, 'mother' isn't a common form in infants' input. A better example would be something like 'wawa' for 'water'.