What is the social function of babbling? An important function of prelinguistic vocalizing may be to elicit parental behavior in ways that facilitate the infant's own learning about speech and language. Infants use parental feedback to their babbling to learn new vocal forms, but the microstructure of parental responses to babbling has not been studied. To enable precise manipulation of the proximal infant cues that may influence maternal behavior, we used a playback paradigm to assess mothers' responsiveness to prerecorded audiovisual clips of unfamiliar infants' noncry prelinguistic vocalizations and actions. Acoustic characteristics and directedness of vocalizations were manipulated to test their efficacy in structuring social interactions. We also compared maternal responsiveness in the playback paradigm and in free play with their own infants. Maternal patterns of reactions to babbling were stable across both tasks. In the playback task, we found specific vocal cues, such as the degree of resonance and the transition timing of consonant-vowel syllables, predicted contingent maternal responding. Vocalizations directed at objects also facilitated increased responsiveness. The responses mothers exhibited, such as sensitive speech and vocal imitation, are known to facilitate vocal learning and development. Infants, by influencing the behavior of their caregivers with their babbling, create social interactions that facilitate their own communicative development.

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Infant babbling has an important social function in promoting early language development by attracting caregiver attention and prompting parents' contingent, simplified speech, which is more learnable for infants. Here, we demonstrate that prelinguistic infant vocalizations also create learning opportunities for infants in childcare settings by eliciting simplified and more learnable linguistic information during teacher‐infant interactions. We compared the rates and complexity of contingent and non‐contingent verbal interactions of 34 childcare teachers during a one‐on‐one free play interaction with a familiar infant under their care (M = 12.6 months old). As compared to non‐contingent utterances, teachers' contingent utterances included fewer unique words, a higher proportion of single‐word responses, and a shorter mean length of utterances. Teachers did not change their response length based on infants' syllable type and were equally likely to respond to vowels and consonant‐vowel vocalizations. Sources of individual differences in the simplification effect related to infant behaviors and teacher characteristics are discussed. The results parallel previous findings demonstrating the simplification effect in parent‐infant interactions. That teachers also show this simplification effect when responding to infant vocalizations suggests the power of infant prelinguistic vocalizations for organizing caregiver attention in various settings to elicit simplified, learnable language.