How baby talk gives infant brains a boost - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage How baby talk gives infant brains a boost được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Test 3 - Passage 2 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking.
How baby talk gives infant brains a boost - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
❓ Câu hỏi (questions)
Question 1 - 4
Look at the following ideas and the list of researchers below.
Match each idea with the correct researcher, A-C.
Write the correct letter, A-C.
List of Findings
A
Elena Delgado
B
Karol Nowak
C
Ingrid Sorensen
1
the value of giving a baby one's undivided attention while talking to it
2
a link between the speech a baby takes in and the baby's own efforts to produce sounds
3
the benefit to a child of having its two parents talk in contrasting manners
4
a relationship between the quantity of baby talk a child hears and how much it vocalises itself
Question 5 - 10
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Research into how parents talk to babies
Researchers based at Ashcombe University relied on , alongside dedicated computer software, to examine the way mothers and fathers spoke to their children over an ordinary day. What emerged was that generally kept their usual way of speaking unchanged when addressing their infants. Under a proposal called the , such parents may adopt a more grown-up style of talk in order to ready their children for the language awaiting them beyond the home. Hearing baby talk from one parent and everyday speech from the other, the researchers argue, widens the of speech types the child can rehearse.
A different study, this one carried out by teams at Brackenridge University and Feltham State University, captured speech and other noise using the special that had been fitted onto each baby. Returning to the children at the age of two, the team discovered that those exposed to plentiful baby talk in their early months had built up a considerably larger than the rest.
Question 11 - 13
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
11
a claim that early experience of language helps a baby to organise information in its mind
12
a comparison of how long babies paid attention to sounds modelled on an adult and on another infant
13
an example of something certain parents do for their baby's benefit before it is born
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📖 Bài đọc (reading passage)
How baby talk gives infant brains a boost
A
A. Why do adults slide so readily into that sing-song, stretched-out, endlessly repeated way of speaking whenever a baby is near? Linguists find the habit fascinating, and want to know what this manner of talking does for a child's learning. Since hearing is among the first senses to form — much of it in place before birth — some hopeful, expectant parents will hold recordings of classical music against the pregnant belly. There is even evidence that, a good twelve weeks before it is born, a baby is already attending to the adult voices nearby and quietly gathering the raw materials of the particular language its family happens to speak.
B
B.
Encountering language early seems to benefit the developing brain: babies brought up with two languages in the house, for instance, often prove better at sorting and ranking information in their minds. So what does the charming, sometimes faintly ridiculous sound of speech directed at infants actually do for them, and how much of a difference does it make? Several recent investigations have set out to uncover the science beneath it, and a number of the most striking are gathered here.
C
As it happens, fathers turn to baby talk much less than mothers, and use it differently — and that, a new study finds, is perfectly fine. Karol Nowak and colleagues at Ashcombe University fitted parents with small microphones and voice-recognition software, then followed how each spoke to their child through an ordinary day. 'Mothers did just what decades of earlier work had described,' Nowak says. 'It was the fathers who surprised us: talking to their children, they barely altered the pitch or underlying frequency of their voices.' The reason, he suspects, lies in an idea first put forward in 1979 — the gateway hypothesis — according to which a father's more grown-up speech offers the child a way into the talk they will meet in the wider world. 'The child rehearses one kind of speech with the mother and a different kind with the father,' Nowak explains, 'and so comes away with a broader range of speech styles to practise.'
D
A separate project, run jointly at Brackenridge University and Feltham State University, collected many thousands of half-minute exchanges between parents and infants, dressing thirty-one babies in recording jackets that picked up speech and sound across a normal eight-hour day. The trend was unmistakable: the more baby talk parents produced, the more their infants babbled. Seen again at the age of two, the children who had been steeped in baby talk showed a markedly larger vocabulary, whatever the family's economic standing. 'Those surrounded by baby talk were saying more than the ones who had mainly heard ordinary adult speech,' notes Elena Delgado of Feltham State University. 'And it matters enormously whether the baby talk is one-to-one,' she adds. 'The more a parent uses it with the child alone, the more the child babbles — and the more it babbles, the more words it later produces.'
E
Another study suggests parents might usefully put babies together, so they can babble among their own kind. Researchers at Rideau University and the Montreal Institute of Human Development observed that infants would sooner listen to one another than to adults — perhaps why baby talk turns up among parents everywhere. Using a synthesiser, they generated repeated vowel sounds modelled either on an adult woman's voice or on another baby's, so that only the sound itself could explain any difference, and then measured how long each held an infant's attention. The baby-like sounds kept it about thirty-five percent longer, and drew more from the listeners besides — a flicker of a smile, or lips starting to move as if forming a sound. This pull toward other babies' voices, the team proposes, may be what first sets speech-learning going. 'It might be some quality of the sound that grabs them,' says co-author Mireille Chabert, 'or they may be drawn to it because they are just starting to notice their own power to make sounds, and sense it as something they too could do.'
F
The last of a series of studies conducted by Ingrid Sorensen and her research team, published in the journal Frontiers in Developmental Neuroscience, took forty-eight babies from two closely spaced age bands — eight-month-olds and eleven-month-olds — and played them syllables, some from their native German and some from Korean, a language none had met. Each lay inside a brain-imaging scanner focused on the region that governs the muscle movements of speech. Sorensen and her colleagues found that hearing baby talk sets the infant brain practising the work of language: the motor areas fired, a sign that even now the brain is trying to answer back and puzzle out how to speak. More telling still, while the eight-month-olds responded alike to every syllable whatever its language, the older babies' brains toiled harder over the motor patterns of the unfamiliar Korean than the familiar German. With that, Sorensen's team may have glimpsed the very process by which babies learn to separate their mother tongue from every other.
Encountering language early seems to benefit the developing brain: babies brought up with two languages in the house, for instance, often prove better at sorting and ranking information in their minds. So what does the charming, sometimes faintly ridiculous sound of speech directed at infants actually do for them, and how much of a difference does it make? Several recent investigations have set out to uncover the science beneath it, and a number of the most striking are gathered here.
C. As it happens, fathers turn to baby talk much less than mothers, and use it differently — and that, a new study finds, is perfectly fine. Karol Nowak and colleagues at Ashcombe University fitted parents with small microphones and voice-recognition software, then followed how each spoke to their child through an ordinary day. 'Mothers did just what decades of earlier work had described,' Nowak says. 'It was the fathers who surprised us: talking to their children, they barely altered the pitch or underlying frequency of their voices.' The reason, he suspects, lies in an idea first put forward in 1979 — the gateway hypothesis — according to which a father's more grown-up speech offers the child a way into the talk they will meet in the wider world. 'The child rehearses one kind of speech with the mother and a different kind with the father,' Nowak explains, 'and so comes away with a broader range of speech styles to practise.'
D. A separate project, run jointly at Brackenridge University and Feltham State University, collected many thousands of half-minute exchanges between parents and infants, dressing thirty-one babies in recording jackets that picked up speech and sound across a normal eight-hour day. The trend was unmistakable: the more baby talk parents produced, the more their infants babbled. Seen again at the age of two, the children who had been steeped in baby talk showed a markedly larger vocabulary, whatever the family's economic standing. 'Those surrounded by baby talk were saying more than the ones who had mainly heard ordinary adult speech,' notes Elena Delgado of Feltham State University. 'And it matters enormously whether the baby talk is one-to-one,' she adds. 'The more a parent uses it with the child alone, the more the child babbles — and the more it babbles, the more words it later produces.'
E. Another study suggests parents might usefully put babies together, so they can babble among their own kind. Researchers at Rideau University and the Montreal Institute of Human Development observed that infants would sooner listen to one another than to adults — perhaps why baby talk turns up among parents everywhere. Using a synthesiser, they generated repeated vowel sounds modelled either on an adult woman's voice or on another baby's, so that only the sound itself could explain any difference, and then measured how long each held an infant's attention. The baby-like sounds kept it about thirty-five percent longer, and drew more from the listeners besides — a flicker of a smile, or lips starting to move as if forming a sound. This pull toward other babies' voices, the team proposes, may be what first sets speech-learning going. 'It might be some quality of the sound that grabs them,' says co-author Mireille Chabert, 'or they may be drawn to it because they are just starting to notice their own power to make sounds, and sense it as something they too could do.'
F. The last of a series of studies conducted by Ingrid Sorensen and her research team, published in the journal Frontiers in Developmental Neuroscience, took forty-eight babies from two closely spaced age bands — eight-month-olds and eleven-month-olds — and played them syllables, some from their native German and some from Korean, a language none had met. Each lay inside a brain-imaging scanner focused on the region that governs the muscle movements of speech. Sorensen and her colleagues found that hearing baby talk sets the infant brain practising the work of language: the motor areas fired, a sign that even now the brain is trying to answer back and puzzle out how to speak. More telling still, while the eight-month-olds responded alike to every syllable whatever its language, the older babies' brains toiled harder over the motor patterns of the unfamiliar Korean than the familiar German. With that, Sorensen's team may have glimpsed the very process by which babies learn to separate their mother tongue from every other.
