Babies Learn Language Best Through Sing-Song Speech, Not Phonetics
Photo by RICKEY HUTCHINSON on Unsplash
A December 1, 2023 article on the NeuroscienceNews.com website at https://neurosciencenews.com/?s=sing-song+speech explores research indicating that babies learn language best through sing-song speech rather than phonetics.
The Neuroscience News article reports on new research suggesting that parents should use sing-song speech, such as nursery rhymes, with their babies, as it aids language development. The research indicates that rhythmic speech, rather than phonetics, is foundational to language acquisition during a child’s first months.
The study by researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin “sheds light on language learning and its relation to dyslexia and developmental language disorders”. Key findings of the study indicate:
Babies learn language more effectively through rhythmic speech, emphasizing word boundaries.
Phonetic information (the smallest sound elements of speech, typically represented by the alphabet) is not fully processed until around seven months of age.
Rhythmic information is a universal aspect of all languages and aids language development.
The article notes, “The researchers recorded patterns of electrical brain activity in 50 infants at four, seven and eleven months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes to an infant. Low frequency bands of brainwaves were fed through a special algorithm, which produced a ‘read out’ of the phonological information that was being encoded. The researchers found that phonetic encoding in babies emerged gradually over the first year of life, beginning with labial sounds (e.g. d for ‘daddy’) and nasal sounds (e.g. m for ‘mummy’) with the ‘read out’ progressively looking more like that of adults.”
This study was part of the BabyRhythm project investigating how language is learnt and how this is related to dyslexia and developmental language disorder. A related study, part of the same project, has shown that ‘rhythmic speech information was processed by babies at two months old – and individual differences predicted later language outcomes”.
The findings indicate that rhythmic information forms a “scaffold or skeleton” onto which phonetic information can then be built. The first author of the study, Professor Giovanni di Liberto, a cognitive and computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin and a researcher at the ADAPT Centre, explained that rhythm is a universal aspect of every language worldwide. “In all language that babies are exposed to there is a strong beat structure with a strong syllable twice a second. We’re biologically programmed to emphasise this when speaking to babies .” Her recommendation to parents is to “talk and sing to their babies as much as possible or use infant directed speech like nursery rhymes because it will make a difference to language outcome.”