Talking Early to Babies Helps the Brain
March 26th 2010 21:27
Signature Tune
Study Shows Speaking Words to Infants Helps the Brain Form Categories
By Jennifer Warner
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MDMarch 26, 2010
Words may have special meaning for babies long before they are able to speak.
A new study suggests talking to babies as young as 3 months old influences their cognitive development and helps the brain learn to form categories.
Researchers found infants who learned to associate words rather than sounds with pictures of objects were better able to perform a simple categorization task.
"These findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories," says researcher Susan Hespos, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern University, in a news release.
Researchers say the results add to growing evidence that it's important to talk to babies from an early age to foster infant development and cognition.
In the study, published in Child Development, researchers compared the effect of words vs. sounds on infant cognition skills in a group of 46 3- to 4-month old infants.
All of the infants were shown a series of pictures, such as a fish, that were paired with either words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told things like, "Look at the toma!" --a made-up word for fish -- while they viewed each picture. Infants in the other group heard a series of beeps carefully matched to the word phrases for tone and duration.
Both groups were then tested on their categorization skills by being shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side by side while researchers measured how long they looked at each image. If the infants had formed a familiar category in their brain with the fish from the previous exercise, they would look at one picture longer than the other.
The results showed infants who heard words had formed the category for fish, and those who heard sounds did not.
"We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorization," says researcher Sandra Waxman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, in the news release. "We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning."
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Comment by Lester Caudill
Round Politics
There was a noticeable reactions from the babies that was in the womb they would move to my voice. When they we had our first born he had already bonded to my voice.
He would cry for me as much as his mother, and as he got older he depended on my more than his mother, I always thought it was because I talked to him so much in the womb.
Comment by Mountain Fog
Infognito
Screen Trek
QUOTE ME NO QUOTES!
hippy no gear!!!
And here's to many more!
I saw your reference to your birthday on Salty's blog.
cheers
fog
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
It was a great comment to receive.
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
That's really sweet of you to say Happy Birthday, although I'll need to get my dictionary out, not real good on the up market speak.
Hope is all going well for you and I'd love you to get a little dog from dog rescue, he/she is bound to be calling out for you, not too many tears now, we all get to pass on and your little darling left this world for the next with such great love.
If I were a little dog I'd love to come and live at your place.
Comment by Mountain Fog
Infognito
Screen Trek
QUOTE ME NO QUOTES!
firstly, just to alleviate any qualms you may have regarding current trends in colloquialisms, my birthday wishes are just my silly jumbling of words, for fun.
Thank you for remembering the loss of my dearest Stella, it still hurts, and I just can't go through that dreadful emotional loss again, well, not for now at least.
cheers and I hope you have a lovely Palm Sunday!
cheers
fog