Even before your baby can babble, you can boost their language learning skills with a few simple tools.
We all know that we should talk to our babies a lot and expose them to language, both in baby talk and in full, descriptive sentences. However, did you know that singing to your baby and enjoying music together is also a great way to improve their ability to learn language?
A recently released study finds a direct link between language and rhythm. Here’s what parents should know.
Rhythm Is Connected To Language (Even When It’s Wordless)
A study published in the journal Developmental Science examines the relationship between music and language.
Researchers tracked how babies’ brains responded to music and to speech patterns. They found a link between the way the brains of infants aged 6-9 months responded to both rhythms and speech patterns.
They were looking for a specific skill set: the ability to break a stream of speech into individual words, based on a measure called statistical learning (SL), which involves finding patterns in the environment (such as those in speech and musical rhythm).
“Speech segmentation (segmenting continuous speech into words) is an important and challenging first step in language acquisition, as word boundaries are not consistently marked in continuous speech…SL performance in infancy is associated with outcome measures of subsequent language development.”
The Study Found Some Important Correlations (And One Important Lack Thereof)
By tracking brain activity, the researchers found that babies who appeared to recognize rhythm in music also appeared to recognize the rhythms (word breaks) in speech.
They used an EEG to measure brain rhythms, looking for brain activity that matched what they call ‘transitional probabilities’ (TPs). Basically, these are the cues that certain sounds or syllables belong together in a single word or unit. (Think of when you type “cof,” and your predictive text suggests that you might like to finish the word with “fee.”)
In speech, this helps break down a complete sentence into its component words.
The research team found that babies who showed greater understanding of musical rhythm also detected TPs more effectively.
Another important finding: babies’ ability to track these changes did not correlate with parents’ ability in the same skills. In other words, those of us who have no sense of rhythm have not necessarily doomed our babies to the same.
Exposure Is The Key To Improving This Skill Set
Just as you can make a conscious choice to expose your babies to lots of language (speaking in baby talk, speaking in clear and descriptive sentences, even exposing your baby to different languages), you can also help improve their sense of rhythm.
Playing music for your baby, engaging them in clapping games, making up songs to describe the current activity (“Oh, I’m washing the baby’s feet, I’m washing the baby’s toes”), singing along with the radio, providing toys that play music, and swaying to a rhythm with your baby all help encourage development of an understanding of rhytm.
Tapping, clapping, or stomping along with music, using rattles or toy drums or even a wooden spoon on pots and pans, can all help too.
You don’t have to play an instrument or even like your own singing voice. All you have to do is expose your baby to rhythm and song and help him experience it.
Most importantly, when you’re engaging in these activities with your baby, you aren’t just teaching him to love music. You’re also promoting the same brain development that will support his language skills.