Babbling babies have something to say

(CNN) -- Your baby's babbling has a purpose after all. Those nonsensical sounds are a child's first real steps to establishing language.

"Baby-talk" is not just random movements of the mouth, but deliberate actions, suggests a report in the latest edition of the journal Science.

Their tests of 10 babies -- ranging from 5 months to a year old -- showed that babies attempt speech at a very early age, the journal reported Thursday.

Language, even at the earliest stages, say lead researchers Laura Ann Petitto and Siobhan Holowka, is under the direct control of the left brain hemisphere, the part responsible for reasoned human thought.

Petitto and Holowka looked at the speech patterns of adults and found that, because the language center is in the left side of the brain, people speak primarily using the right side of the face more than the left.

That pattern was consistent with babies as well. Their findings showed that babies babbled mostly on the right side of the mouth (controlled by the left brain hemisphere) and smiled mostly on the left (perhaps due to the control of the emotion-related right brain hemisphere).

These findings may be significant since other studies indicate that language learning requires powerful statistical thinking, and the ability to identify and reapply different grammatical patterns.

The researchers, from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, suggest that speaking to babbling babies may help them to learn to speak, because hearing a variety of sounds may help them to establish language on their own. So language-play, or so called baby-talk by adults, may actually help children form words more quickly.

The researchers are not stopping there. Two concurrent studies are in the works that build upon their findings. Petitto believes the ability to identify when babies are truly trying to communicate, may lay the groundwork for early detection of children at risk for developmental delays.

Her research team is also studying the changes in brain activity, to more specifically isolate the areas in the brain responsible for the formation of infant speech patterns. She believes in one to two years, they will have more definitive proof that baby talk is not simple childs-play after all.