Singing to babies may help them learn a new language, claims new study
University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, who jointly investigated babies' ability to process phonetic information during their first year for their findings published in the 'Nature Communications' journal.
They concluded that parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months.
«Our research shows that the individual sounds of speech are not processed reliably until around seven months, even though most infants can recognise familiar words like 'bottle' by this point,» said Goswami.
«From then individual speech sounds are still added in very slowly — too slowly to form the basis of language,» she said.
Phonetic information, the smallest sound elements of speech, typically represented by the alphabet, has been considered by many linguists the foundation of language.
Infants are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words.
However, the new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic speech helps babies learn language by emphasising the boundaries of individual words and is effective even in the first months of life.
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.
