when I was a kid I had a baby cousin who crawled up to me, looked me dead in the eye and said GOO.

I was unsure of what to do, just sorta instinctively said goo back.

he continued holding eye contact but cracked a smile.

he started crawling away when I heard GAA.

i said it back to him when he was a good distance. He liked me.

anyway, whereever you are in Santa fe, good job getting your doctorate, Erin.

Babies will mimick whatever sounds you say.

Modern parenting practice is not to teach them gibberish first, when you might as well speak normally to them. They're small humans and should be treated as humans. Would you say goo goo ga ga to your friends or co-workers?

Grown ups who speak baby language to children are frowned upon. Why are they doing that boomer shit? They look like idiots and it isn't helping anyone.

If you want to change your communication to facilitate a faster learning curve for a child to learn spoken language, you're better off combining regular speech with sign language. They pick that up faster.

Every baby says goo or gaa at some point.

Those are just representative sounds. Like ‘bang’ and ‘pow’ in comic books.

And ive never heard a barbarian say 'bar bar bar', either! Its a conspiracy I tell you!

Since it's unlikely that the babies have combined forces with supernatural powers to share knowledge upon entrance into the world, I think it's safe to assume that it's intended to be a representation of the nonsense gibberish they utter while learning how their mouth and vocal cords work.

Toddlers can speak usually, you're thinking of babies

Is it related to this post?

My son liked saying Ba. He called me Baba before saying papa or daddy.

Babies first sounds are usually a consonant followed by a vowel. So ma, pa, ga, gu, ba. A few months later they start duplicating the sounds while testing out their speaking abilities so you get mama, papa, gaga, googoo, baba. Which are common first words for lots of baby things. Like baba for my sister was her bottle. Every baby might not say every variation while they're learning and they will obviously have favorite words but generally that's why we consider baby speech like that. Maybe english just happens to choose the "g" for the leading consonant because we have a lot of hard g words in english and that's what babies pick up on first.

Well you haven't lived!

Toddlers whose families use Google Home: