New Study Shows How to Improve A Baby’s Language Skills

Researchers have discovered that introducing varying sounds when babies are four months old is likely to help them speed up their language processing abilities, which will improve their language skills as they grow older. The study also showed that the way babies respond to sounds is a predictor of whether they are likely to have trouble dealing with language in the future.

Challenges for babies

The challenges that a baby faces in the first few months of its life, as its brain develops, are staggering. There are touches, smells, sounds, sights, and emotional experiences that a very young brain must learn to process, and these form the foundation for social behavior, emotions, and language skills. If these things cannot find their right places in a baby’s brain, developmental delays may occur. These are the results of a new study published in the October 1 issue of Journal of Neuroscience, authored by Rutgers University-Newark neuroscientist April Benasich and her co-researchers.

In their previous studies, this group of researchers determined that children who develop dyslexia and other reading disorders, or who learn to speak later, possess brains that have deviations in detecting small speech distinctions, such as the difference between “ba” and “da.”

Babies’ detection and response to sounds

Although genetics plays a role in infant development, some babies with speech difficulties have no family history of developmental problems. With this in mind, Benasich and her colleagues analyzed the brain maps of a select group of healthy babies in order to fully understand how they detect and respond to various sounds.

For their study, they fitted three groups of babies with skull caps furnished with numerous electronic sensors. One group of babies was shown videos with no sound. Another group was presented with the sounds without the video, and the last group was exposed to the sounds with the synchronized video. The researchers then studied how the babies responded to the sounds and the video.

They found that it was not the sounds per se that inspired the responses, but the changes in the tone and frequency of the utterances. The babies that were shown the video with the sounds indicated richer language sound mapping when they started babbling at around 18 months. They were able to discriminate sound differences faster and paid attention to the differences in the sounds, even if they were miniscule.

For the purposes of the study, the parents brought their babies for weekly sessions over a span of six weeks, and each session lasted six to eight minutes long. The sessions may have been brief, but the researchers were surprised at how strong the effects were. The experiments, according to Benasich, laid the foundation in the test subjects’ brains for the efficient processing of language sounds, which will later help them in their language acquisition efforts. Now that this study is over, Benasich is extending the research parameters to test a parent-friendly interactive toy that can be used with babies to help them distinguish a variety of sounds.

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