Cambridge researchers have revealed why the songs of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers are so significant for infants. Babies learn words through rhythm and tone rather than through individual speech sounds, as many had thought. The team says talking to infants in a melodic way — or better yet, singing — helps infants learn language.
They argue the idea that knowledge of individual speech sounds is the key to language learning is wrong.
What the Researchers Found
The Cambridge team found that infants learn language based on rhythmic information, like rises and falls in tone. They determined that babies do not process phonetic information—the smallest sounds of language—until they are about seven months old.
They also found that dyslexia and speech-development disorders may be linked to problems with rhythm perception rather than problems processing individual speech sounds.
People used to think infants memorize small sound elements and piece them together to form words.
To test this assumption, the team recorded the brain activity of 50 infants aged 4, 7, and 11 months while the infants watched a video of a preschool teacher singing 18 children’s songs. The researchers used specialized algorithms to interpret how the infants encoded that information in their brains. They found that phonetic coding develops gradually over the first year of life. Goswami, a professor of neurobiology at Cambridge and the study’s lead researcher, said infants use rhythmic information as a framework they then fill in with phonetic detail.
Key Takeaways
“Our research showed that individual sounds of language are not reliably processed until about seven months, although most infants can recognize familiar words by that time,” Goswami said.
After seven months, language sounds start to accumulate, but they pile up too slowly to form the foundation of language; rhythm provides the “hidden glue” that supports a working language system.
Sing to babies as often as possible and read them nursery rhymes, Goswami says.
This study is part of a project examining the connection between speech and dyslexia and other speech-development disorders, the Independent reported. Goswami has pointed out that science has long tried to explain these disorders by blaming phonetic problems. But evidence for that theory has been weak. Now individual differences in children’s language learning may be linked to rhythm.
The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.
