Babies Learn Language Through Poems and Songs — Research 0 21

What is meant by learning to speak? It means mastering individual sounds and understanding how they combine into words that have specific meanings. It is also necessary to realize how words form sentences and how to distinguish individual words within those sentences. One might think of grammar, but when small children learn to speak, they do not use textbooks — they simply listen to adults and themselves.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin described language experiments with infants in two recent articles. About fifty children watched videos of a primary school teacher performing various children's songs. The children watched these videos several times during their first year of life. At the same time, their brain activity was monitored using electroencephalography. By processing the EEG data with a special algorithm, it was possible to determine how the brain responds to different aspects of spoken language.

It turned out that the brain gradually tunes into individual speech sounds, starting with nasal and bilabial consonants. The brain learns rhythmic information — changes in intonation in phrases, stresses, and accents — significantly faster than it perceives individual sounds. Mastery of speech rhythm actively occurs even in two-month-old infants. This may seem paradoxical — how can one learn stresses without being able to distinguish individual phonemes well? However, according to the researchers, it is the understanding of rhythm that creates a foundation in the child's brain, onto which phonetic information is later layered. A sense of rhythm helps, in particular, to distinguish where one word ends and another begins, which is one of the biggest challenges in language learning for both children and adults.

Rhythm is present in any speech, but it is especially abundant in poems and songs. Therefore, it is particularly beneficial for children to listen to nursery rhymes and lullabies — they help them master the rhythmic structure of language more quickly. Language progress, as the experiments showed, depends on how the infant brain absorbs speech rhythm. Perhaps the new findings will lead to the development of new educational methods — using poems and songs — that will help children learn language faster and better, including those who are born with special developmental needs in the nervous system.