The cooing and burbling of babies may provide an early indication of problems in mental development, according to researchers at the John Hopkins Medical Institutions who have devised a test based on such noises.
The pediatricians say that their Clinical Linguistic and Auditory Milestone Scale will allow health professionals to detect severe mental retardation in infants as young as 6 months old. The test can also determine whether children as young as 2 years old have moderate developmental problems, they say.