Nursery rhymes, children’s songs and lullabies help newborn babies learn to talk faster. This conclusion was reached by British scientists from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. The study was published on: magazine Nature Communications (NatComms).
The new study was motivated by a desire to better understand how infants process speech in the first year of life, with a particular focus on the neural coding of phonetic categories in sustained natural speech.
A group of 50 children aged four, seven and 11 months participated in the study. In a carefully controlled environment, babies sat in high chairs three feet away from their caregivers in a soundproof room. Each child was given 18 nursery rhymes to listen to.
To understand how babies’ brains responded to these poems, scientists tracked their brain signals using electroencephalography (EEG). The brainwave data were then analyzed using a complex algorithm to decode the phonological information; This allowed the babies to create a “reading” of how their brains processed the different sounds in nursery rhymes.
Researchers have found that babies do not process individual speech sounds reliably until they are seven months old. Even at the age of eleven months, when many children begin to say their first words, the processing of these sounds is still minimal.
Additionally, the research found that babies’ phonetic coding gradually improves over the first year of life. Brain activity readings showed that babies’ processing of speech sounds begins with simpler sounds, such as lips and nasal sounds, and as they grow, this processing becomes more adult-like.
Experts suggest that rhythmic speech (the pattern of stress and intonation in spoken language) is critical for babies’ language learning. They found that rhythmic speech information is processed by infants from the age of two months and that this processing predicts later speech outcomes.
Scientists noted that it is important for parents to talk to their children as much as possible, sing to them and sing rhythmic nursery rhymes. This can have a significant impact on how well and quickly babies can start talking on their own.
“We believe that knowledge of speech rhythm is the secret glue underlying the development of a well-functioning language system. Infants can use rhythmic information as a scaffold and then add phonetic information to it,” said study co-author Professor Usha Goswami.
Previous scientists I learnedWe know that babies start learning language in the womb.