Hearing, attention and listening in babies.
- A baby’s hearing is well developed right from birth.
- Babies become more selective over their first year in what they attend to.
- By the end of their first year they listen attentively to speech.
(Buckley, 2006).
The new research from Purdue University shows that a caregiver’s touch could help babies to find words in the continuous stream of speech.
In the Daily Mail Amanda Seidl, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences and who led the study at Purdue, said: “We found that infants treat touches as if they are related to what they hear and thus these touches could have an impact on their word learning.
“We think of touch as conveying affection, but our recent research shows that infants can relate touches to their incoming speech signal.
“Others have looked at the role of touch with respect to babies forming an attachment and physical development.
“But until now the impact of touch on language learning has not been explored.”
The article also says that learning to speak is actually quite difficult for babies because most of the words they hear are in a continuous stream of speech, rather than words on their own.
Parents may pause before saying an infant’s name, but they almost never do so for other words.
This research explored whether touches could help infants to find where words begin and end in the continuous stream of speech.
“They need to find words before they can attach real meaning to their words,” Seidl said.
“Because names of body parts are often the first words that babies learn and touching is often involved when caregivers talk about body parts, we speculated that touch could act as a cue to word edges.
“I am interested in whether we can predict babies’ language later on from early measures of speech perception,” Seidl said.
“If we look at speech perception and learning in a 6-month-old can we predict their language ability at 3 years? If we can find out what kinds of learners young children are, we could target their learning environment to their learning style.”
The experiment used 48 English-learning 4-month-olds. The baby was placed on the parent’s lap facing an experimenter while a pre-recorded continuous stream of speech of nonsense words was played to them.
In the first experiment, every time a nonsense word, such as ‘dobita,’ was spoken, the experimenter touched the baby’s knee. In the second experiment the experimenter touched his or her eyebrow or chin instead of the baby.
The babies then took part in a language preference study, and almost all showed that they had pulled ‘dobita’ out of the continuous stream of speech.
The children in the second experiment did not show that they had pulled out any words.
“It didn’t matter how much time the infant spent looking at the experimenter’s face, the babies were not able to use these cues in the same way as they were when their own body was touched,” said Seidl, who is now looking at individual differences in how parents speak and touch their baby.
To read the article got to: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2612418/Could-tickling-baby-help-learn-SPEAK-Researchers-sense-touch-linked-speech-development.html#ixzz306MhHH99
Resources
BUCKLEY, B. (2006) Children’s communication skills from birth to five years. London and New York: Routledge.
Written by Rachel Harrison
Speech and Language Therapist
On behalf of Integrated Treatment Services.
April 2014
