How baby talk gives infant brains a boost
A
AWhy 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
BEncountering 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
CAs 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
DA 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
EAnother 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
FThe 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.
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Question 1 - 4
Match each idea with the correct researcher, A-C.
A
B
C
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
List of options
A
Elena Delgado
B
Karol Nowak
C
Ingrid Sorensen