Group items tagged

This article talked about how adults talk to babies and why we do it. When we talk to babies, we tend to raise our pitch a little and supposedly, it calms the baby down. They also talked about a research project where they recorded adults from different parts of the world, and noticed that those who come from western places raised their pitch the most, and in remote places didn't raise their pitch that much but everyone raised their pitch at least a little. The way we talk to babies is universal and we've evolved as humans to be able to communicate with infants.

The features of baby talk - softer tone, higher pitch, almost unintelligible vocabulary - are global. Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab documented over 1,500 recordings in 21 urban, rural and Indigenous communities - making their work possibly a first of its kind experiment. The article includes samples from different languages around the world. There are many reasons why baby talk might have evolved in humans and why it might serve beneficial purposes. Some theories suggest that the way we speak accentuates the vowels of the speech and helps babies learn speech. Other theories suggest that this kind of baby talk helps regulate the baby's emotions and helps structure the social interactions we have with babies, so it helps socialize them and control their behavior and mood. In prehistoric times, having ways to interact with babies and to care for them while still being able to keep your eyes up to look out for predators and use your voice to interact with babies, might have been an important reason why we may have evolved these kinds of behaviors.

This article discusses how baby talk can impact child development and explains how baby talk can aid babies/infants in emotional bonding. It talks about the belief that talking in simplified sentences and exaggerated tones helps babies grasp speech patterns and emotions.

Babies first start learning language by listening to the rhythm and intonations of speech. They specifically listen to high pitches versus low ones and the loudness of syllables in speech. Before a baby is even born they already begin developing language. When in the womb, the intonation patterns of the mother are heard in the womb. "Baby talk" used by people to infants is a crucial part of an infants learning.Parents often exaggerate these aspects of language, which helps a baby to acquire it. Research shows babies prefer listening to this exaggerated, singsong way of talking compared to regular adult talk.

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies. They measured parents' use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings. "What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The more parents exaggerated vowels -- for example "How are youuuuu?" -- and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the 1-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around. "The fact that the infant's babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Kuhl said.

The more parents exaggerate vowels and raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, the more the babies babble, new research shows. Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear, the faster their vocabulary grows.

Dr. Michael Rich is the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders. Rich notes some major takeaways: 1.Babies' brains are elastic: the first three years of life are critical for both language and overall brain development. Unlike other animals, humans are born with embryonic brains, rendering babies helpless and in need of caregivers while also providing a developmental advantage: allowing us to build our brains in response to the challenges and stimuli of the environment we're in," In the first three years of life, the brain triples in volume due to synaptic connections, therefore stimuli and challenges babies receive within that time frame help babies build creative, flexible and resilient brains. 2. Face to face interaction is valuable. 3. It's not just about screen time duration, but the type of content being consumed. For example, young children can interact meaningfully via Facetime, if they've previously interacted with that person. However, screens as a distraction for kids in lieu of human interaction= not good.

This article talks about how screen time affects babies language development. The first nine months of a baby's life are important for a child to understand sounds and how they should be used. They are able to understand language much earlier than they actually start talking. Many doctors and scientists encourage parents to communicate with their babies as soon as possible to develop language. Recent studies found that babies that spent more time in front of a screen than talking suffered in language development. I found it interesting that not all screen time is necessarily bad for a child's language development. For example, FaceTime can be beneficially for children because they are interacting in a meaningful way but using screens as a distraction for kids can be harmful.

New research suggests that 3-month-old human babies can use lemur calls as teaching aids. The findings hint at a deep biological connection between language and learning. But not everyone agrees that the new work shows that primate sounds can stimulate a child's linguistic instinct. "This work tells us that sounds that are more like human language are more effective," says , a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. "What is more controversial is why they are effective." She says it's still unclear whether the primate sounds are stimulating some deep linguistic circuit in the brain or just getting the babies to look.

Psychology professor Rachel Albert studies babbling, which until recently was considered to be mere motor practice, something babies did to exercise their mouths. Few people thought of it as a vocabulary all its own. But parents, take note: All those repetitive syllables are an important signal. Albert says they tell us that babies are "putting themselves in this optimal state of being ready to learn." Babbles create an opportunity for a social feedback loop - also known as a conversation. And if you listen closely, you can even decipher a babble's four distinctive categories, from the whiny "nasal creaking" of newborns to the more mature bah-bahs and dah-dahs of older babies. But Albert says if you can't tell your "quasi-resonant vocalizations" from your "canonical syllables," don't worry too much. All you really need to know is this: babbling equals learning.

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

When babies point their fingers in the air, there are meanings to their gestures. Pointing is an early sign of communication, before they even start talking. It's important to foster their learning by starting with their gestures and talking to them while they move. When you mirror your child, it will help them grow confidence and show them that communication is important and effective

Elise Piazza, lead author and a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, said, "Motherese contains exaggerated pitch contours and repetitive rhythms that help babies segment the complex noises around them into building blocks of language." She added that the speaking style also helps parents capture the attention of their babies and engage them emotionally.

Words and Speech for babies

Dr. Mitsuhiko Ota, a linguist in the University of Edinburgh Language Sciences department, was the lead researcher in a 2018 study (Ota, Davies-Jenkins, and Skarabela 2018) examining infant-directed speech, a.k.a. baby talk. Across languages, lexical items specific to infant-directed speech (i.e., 'baby-talk words') are characterized by three major features: 1. onomatopoeia incorporated into non-arbitrary, "highly iconic" words, e.g. "quack", "bow wow" 2. diminutives, e.g. "daddy", "tummy" 3. reduplication, e.g. "din din", "easy peasy" These three lexical characteristics may help infants discover the referential nature of words, identify word referents, and segment fluent speech into words. If so, the amount of lexical input containing these properties should predict infants' rate of vocabulary growth. To test this prediction, Ota's team tracked the vocabulary size in 47 English-learning infants from 9 to 21 months and examined whether vocabulary growth was related to measures of iconicity, diminutives, and reduplication in the lexical input at 9 months. The team's analyses showed that both diminutives and reduplication in the input were associated with vocabulary growth, although measures of iconicity were not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonological properties typical of lexical input in infant-directed speech play a role in early vocabulary growth.

"Talk to your baby," Dr. Cutler said. "Your baby is picking up useful knowledge about language even though they're not actually learning words." Before, many believed babies did not learn sound until six months of life. However, studies now have shown that "newborns can recognize the voices they've been hearing for the last trimester in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers, and prefer those voices to the voices of strangers." In addition, the language heard before birth and in the first months of life affect sound perception and sound production. These two discoveries have led to a better understanding of language learning and brain development in babies.

Researchers at the University of Washington developed a play-based, intensive, English-language method and curriculum and implemented the research-based program in four public infant-education centers in Madrid, Spain. Based on years of UW's I-LABS (Institute of Learning and Brain Science) research on infant brain and language development, UW's pilot bilingual education method utilized the following brain-research principles: 1. social interaction 2. play 3. high quality and quantity of language from the teachers. 4. Use of "infant-directed speech", or "parentese": the speech style parents use to talk to their babies, which has simpler grammar, higher and exaggerated pitch, and drawn-out vowels. 5. Active child engagement. The country's extensive public education system enabled the researchers to enroll 280 infants and children from families of varying income levels. Babies aged 7 to 33.5 months were given one hour of English sessions a day, using the UW method, for 18 weeks, while a control group received the Madrid schools' standard bilingual program. Both groups of children were tested in Spanish and English at the start and end of the 18 weeks. Children who received the UW method showed rapid increases in English comprehension and production, and significantly outperformed the control group peers at all ages on all tests of English. By the end of the 18-week program, the children in the UW program produced an average of 74 English words or phrases per child, per hour; children in the control group produced 13 English words or phrases per child, per hour. This 3 minute video succinctly captures the study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE5fBAS6gf4

The gene that affects how babies pick up language has been identified. If we know more about this gene, can we nurture children and help them learn to better suit their needs and increase their language capabilities?

The more parents talk to their children, the faster those children's vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. The problem seems to be cumulative. By the time children are two, there is a six-month disparity in the language-processing skills and vocabulary of toddlers from low-income families. Toddlers learn new words from their context, so the faster a child understands the words he already knows, the easier it is for him to attend to those he does not. Dr Anne Fernald, of Stanford, found that words spoken directly to a child, rather than those simply heard in the home, are what builds vocabulary. Plonking children in front of the television does not have the same effect. Neither does letting them sit at the feet of academic parents while the grown-ups converse about Plato. The effects can be seen directly in the brain. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University studies how linguistic disparities are reflected in the structure of the parts of the brain involved in processing language. Although she cannot yet prove that hearing speech causes the brain to grow, it would fit with existing theories of how experience shapes the brain. Babies are born with about 100 billion neurons, and connections between these form at an exponentially rising rate in the first years of life. It is the pattern of these connections which determines how well the brain works, and what it learns. By the time a child is three, there will be about 1,000 trillion connections in his brain, and that child's experiences continuously determine which are strengthened and which pruned. This process, gradual and more-or-less irreversible, shapes the trajectory of the child's life.And it is this gap, more than a year's pre-schooling at the age of four, which seems to determine a child's chances for the rest of his life.

Playing a series of sounds to infants can speed up the way they process language and can also predict which infants will have trouble with language as they develop. Researchers concluded that processing language sounds sets up the neural foundation in babies.

The way that babies react to certain sounds can indicate their learning patterns and language capabilities later in life.

In this TED-Talk, Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez, linguistics professor at the University of Washington and a specialist in the brain processes of children 0-3 years, lays out the benefits of bilingualism, tells how to optimize language learning to achieve better acquisition, and dispels some common concerns about the cons of creating a bilingual child. No surprises here: start early, and create conditions where babies are exposed to the desired target languages-this will enable babies to process the sounds of dual languages, not just one. Ideally, babies will have frequent, social interactions with fully-competent, fluent speakers of the target languages. Ramirez also mentions a major cognitive benefit to bilingualism: a strengthened prefrontal cortex: the area of the brain that deals with task-switching and flexible thinking.