London, MArch 28: Are you confused by the sheer number of smart toys, books and videos? Relax. All your baby needs to boost brainpower is you, say scientists.
A new study has revealed that mothers who use baby talk help their child’s brain develop better — as even before toddlers begin to speak, words play an important role in their mind development.
And for three-month-old babies, words influence their thinking process better than any other kind of sound including musical tones, says the study. For their study, the scientists at Northwestern University analysed 50 three-month-old infants who were shown a series of pictures of fish which were paired with either words or beeps.
Infants in the word group were told, for example, “Look at the toma!” — a made up word for fish, as they looked at each picture. Toddlers in the other group heard a series of beeps matched to the word phrases for tone and duration. The study found that babies who heard words were able to categorise them, whereas babies who heard just simple tone noises did not, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.
Lead author Dr Susan Hespos said the results were “striking”. “We found that although infants who heard in the word and tone groups saw exactly the same pictures for exactly the same amount of time, those who heard words formed the category fish and those who heard tones did not. “For infants as young as three months of age, words exert a special influence that supports the ability to form a category and the findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories,” she said.
Added co-author Professor Sandra Waxman: “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 categorisation. “We proposed that over time, this 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.”
The findings are to appear in the next month’s edition of the ‘Child Development’ journal.
–PTI