Why nursery rhymes are best for your child’s brain: Speaking in a sing-song voice helps babies to learn language, study finds

According to experts, parents should use nursery rhymes and sing songs to help young babies learn language.

The slow, rising and falling rhythm of nursery rhymes like Humpty Dumpty, much like the relaxed, sing-song speech that parents use with young babies, helps babies identify individual words within sentences, the evidence suggests.

Scientists have now concluded that rhythm is vital, after discovering that babies do not adequately detect individual sound types such as ‘ba’ and ‘ga’ until they are seven months old.

Researchers led by the University of Cambridge measured the brain activity of 50 babies, who were played recordings of 18 nursery rhymes sung when they were four, seven and 11 months old.

Previous analyzes found that babies’ brains respond to rhythm at all these ages.

For example, a word like “Humpty,” where the first syllable is said with greater emphasis than the second, produces specific brain activity in babies and can help them understand that many English words have this “da-dum” structure.

Now, a new analysis provides more evidence that it is, in fact, rhythm, rather than the sounds of individual words, that helps young babies learn language.

To test whether babies learn from the phonetic components of each word, such as ‘ba’, ‘ma’ or ‘ga’, the researchers observed their brain response about a quarter of a second after each sound during nursery rhymes.

They ignored previously seen brain responses in response to the rhythm, to focus only on the individual sounds of the words.

Increased brain activity to word sounds was not observed in young babies and emerged only when the babies were seven months old.

This activity was not very strong, even when the babies were 11 months old.

The findings suggest that rhythmic speech is better than single word sounds for learning language during the important window when babies are very young.

That means that parents who recite nursery rhymes or use sung speech, which exaggerates the rising and falling pitch of words like ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ give babies more clues about how language works than if they spoke normally.

Lead author of the study, neuroscientist Professor Usha Goswami, from the University of Cambridge, said: “Our research shows that individual speech sounds are not reliably processed until around seven months, although most babies can recognize familiar words like ‘baby bottle’ by this point.

“Thereafter, the individual speech sounds are added very slowly, too slowly to form the basis of language.

‘We believe that information about speech rhythm is the hidden glue that underpins the development of a well-functioning linguistic system.

“Parents should talk and sing to their babies as much as possible or use baby-directed speech, such as nursery rhymes, because that will make a difference to the language outcome.”

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, used a special algorithm to separate how babies’ brains respond to the rhythm and phonetic sounds of words separately, in EEG recordings taken with electrodes placed on their heads.

Babies seem to take a long time to learn the sounds in words, starting by understanding the sounds made by the upper front teeth, such as ‘d’ for ‘daddy’, before picking up sounds made by blowing air through the nose, such as ‘ m’ from ‘mom’. .

But this detection of phonetic sounds only seems to begin at seven months, beyond the four- to six-month window when babies are known to recognize words.

Therefore, pacing should help before this point, the researchers suggest.

Previous studies suggest that babies detect some phonetic sounds at an earlier age, but have often been based on babies turning their heads more toward the sound of a word in their own language, rather than toward a different or imagined language. .

The authors say their research, which used brain activity during nursery rhymes, suggests that very young babies may not rely on word sounds when processing language from complete sentences in speech, even if they can detect the sounds in words. individual sounds.

The findings could help better understand what goes wrong in children who learn language more difficultly, such as those with dyslexia, when they are still babies.

Professor Giovanni Di Liberto, first author of the study, from Trinity College Dublin, said: “This is the first evidence we have of how brain activity is related to changes in phonetic information over time in response to continuous speech. “.