The Benefits of Talking to Your Baby
The Daily Mail recently reported on research that claims that parents can help to boost their baby’s ability to make friends and learn by talking to them.
The newspaper says: “It’s already been proven that cooing at a newborn baby is a vital part of teaching them to speak.
Now, scientists claim that talking to babies gives them advantages in life far beyond a larger vocabulary.
They say that chatting to babies under the age of one, helps them make friends, as well as making them brighter because they are better able to discover the world around them.
In recent years, there have been many studies about the ‘word gap’ – the idea that parents in impoverished homes speak less to their children, leading to their kids not achieving as much as they might at school and earning less in later life.
But Sandra Waxman, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: ‘It’s not because [children] have low vocabularies that they fail to achieve later on. That’s far too simple.’
‘The vocabulary of a child – raised in poverty or in plenty – is really an index of the larger context in which language participates.’
In a study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, she and Athena Vouloumanos of New York University advocate talking to babies.
Dr Vouloumanos believes this is important not only because it teaches them more words, but because ‘listening to speech promotes the babies’ acquisition of the fundamental cognitive and social psychological capacities that form the foundation for subsequent learning.’
The researchers say that babies who have been exposed to more human speech are better than their peers are listening to interesting sound, which allow them to pick people with whom they can communicate, as well as more easily absorb information about the world around them.
Professor Waxman told MailOnline: ‘Because they [babies] are so “clued in” to language, when they are listening to language, their attention to objects and events in the world is heightened.
‘This heightened focus, or attention, promotes rapid learning and discovery.’
She continued: ‘These new results…tell us that infants as young as 2 or 3 months of age not only love to listen to speech, but that they learn about fundamental cognitive and social relations better in the context of listening to speech than in any other context we’ve discovered yet.
‘Nobody would have thought that,’
‘This early tuned sensitivity to human language has positive, cascading developmental consequences that go way beyond learning language.’”
For more information go to: The Daily Mail
Written by Rachel Harrison, speech and language therapist, on behalf of Integrated Treatment Services. www.integratedtreatmentservices.co.uk