ABSTRACT
Children play with sounds from the early months of life. They do this for the sheer pleasure and fun of experimenting and of course it prepares the way for speech. Marian Whitehead observes how babies and their carers ‘blow “raspberries”, gurgle, squeal and babble’ for the fun and delight of doing it (Whitehead, 2004: 90). This playing with sound happens when the child is alone too, and at night before they settle to sleep. Ruth Weir recorded and analysed the pre-sleep monologues of her own child, Antony, and noted that he sometimes made up nonsense sequences like ‘Bink, let Bobo bink’ (Weir, 1962: 105). Later research studies in the 1980s and early 1990s suggested that children’s attempts at rhyming and using alliteration in their babbling may help with learning to read later on (Goswami and Bryant, 1990). This love of sound continues in older children and finds expression in their delight in nonsense verse and other verse that uses alliteration in witty and lively ways.
