Professor Usha Goswami is among researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, who jointly investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year for their findings published in the ‘Nature Communications’ journal this month.
They concluded that parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months.
Prof. Goswami said: “Our research shows that the individual sounds of speech are not processed reliably until around seven months, even though most infants can recognise familiar words like ‘bottle’ by this point.
“From then individual speech sounds are still added in very slowly – too slowly to form the basis of language.”
Phonetic information, the smallest sound elements of speech, typically represented by the alphabet, has been considered by many linguists to be the foundation of language. Infants are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. However, the new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic speech helps babies learn language by emphasising the boundaries of individual words and is effective even in the first months of life.
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The researchers recorded patterns of electrical brain activity in 50 infants at four, seven and eleven months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes to an infant. Low frequency bands of brainwaves were fed through a special algorithm, which produced a ‘read out’ of the phonological information that was being encoded.
The researchers found that phonetic encoding in babies emerged gradually over the first year of life, beginning with labial sounds (eg d for “daddy”) and nasal sounds (eg m for “mummy”), with the "read out" progressively looking more like that of adults.
First author, Professor Giovanni Di Liberto, a cognitive and computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin and a researcher at the ADAPT Centre, said: “This is the first evidence we have of how brain activity relates to phonetic information changes over time in response to continuous speech.”
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Previously, studies have relied on comparing the responses to nonsense syllables, like “bif” and “bof” instead. The latest study forms part of the BabyRhythm project led by Goswami, which is investigating how language is learnt and how this is related to dyslexia and developmental language disorder. She believes that it is rhythmic information – the stress or emphasis on different syllables of words and the rise and fall of tone – that is the key to language learning.
The research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and by Science Foundation Ireland.
