Think of it as a kind of pidgin language between adults and children, which like any language, can preserve archaic features. This repetition is called canonical or reduplicative babbling, which in turn is imitated in baby talk, or child directed speech (CDS), in a limited set of English words. When they are a bit older, a limited set of consonants - usually stops and nasals - combine with the vowel sounds into babbling, a word imitative of infant sounds like bababa. When infants begin to vocalize beyond crying, they imitate the prosody of the language around them with vowel sounds. The distinctive linguistic feature in words like papa, dada, mama or bubba is called reduplication, or to be precise, exact reduplication, where a single CV syllable is repeated.
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