TeaTalking to my baby or toddler shapes the structure of their, my colleagues and my brain discovered,
For the study, which is published in The Journal of Neuroscience, we enrolled
163 children at the age of six months or 30 months. The children wore a small audio recorder in a specially made vest for between one and three days.
We recorded all the language input they received – such as adults talking to the child, adults talking to each other and siblings talking. In total, we recorded over 6,200 hours of conversations.
We also studied the brain development of these children. They came to the local hospital with their families around normal bedtime and made themselves at home in the “sleeping rooms”. When they fell asleep, the research team lifted the child onto a trolley and placed them, still asleep, in an MRI machine.
The child had protective, noise-canceling headphones on, and a researcher monitored them in the room the entire time. Happily, most of the children remained asleep for 40 minutes after the scanning.
brain development
The brain scans we did focused on something called myelin. Myelin grows around nerve cells in the brain, making communication between cells more efficient. We were particularly interested in the amount of myelin in brain regions associated with language processing.
The question was whether children who heard more language would have more myelin in their language-processing brain regions. This suggests that these children had more sophisticated language-processing abilities.
And this is what we found: 30-month-olds who heard more words spoken by nearby adults during our recording period had more myelin in brain regions related to language. Interestingly, this relationship was quite specific, appearing in language areas of the brain, but not in other areas, such as movement or sensation.
So talking to your child really shapes their mind.
We also found that adult word input mattered for six-month-old infants, but here the relationship was inverse. That is, six-month-olds who heard more language had less myelin in brain areas related to language.
It is not yet clear why we see this effect. One possibility is that this finding has to do with differences in the way the brain develops in the first few years of life. During the first year of life, the brain is busy growing new cells, so listening to a lot of language can speed up brain development. Research Shows That This Brain Enhancement May Actually Slow Down Brain Speed formation of myelin, In contrast, at ages two and three, the brain is busy growing myelin, so there is a lot of myelin from a lot of input.
This suggests that talking matters as much at six months as it does at 30 months, but it affects the brain differently because the brain is in a different “state”.
A six-month-old baby’s chattering over and over again may sound a bit strange – clearly, they don’t understand everything you say. But slowly, hour by hour and day by day, it all adds up. All that chatter matters.
Good Ways to Talk to Babies and Toddlers
Of course, there are different ways to get babies and toddlers to talk – reading to them, singing to them, and talking to other adults when they’re around. Parents may wonder whether some methods of talking to babies are better than others.
The answer appears to be that quantity matters early in a child’s life. Research has found that parenting language-rich environment May have a leg up in early language development. However, this benefit came from conversations directed at the child – not conversations between others overheard by the child.
But as the children grow up, quality may dominate, High-quality “interaction” where child and caregiver take turns really helpful,
A key characteristic of these conversations is that they are contingent – meaning that what you do and say depends on what the child does and vice versa. So when your child catches a toy train, you say “Train!” And then the child says “choo choo”, you are answering each other casually. Evidence suggests that this type of casual conversation laying the foundation For elementary language learning.
A great way to start these conversations is to look at who your child is playing with. and join – and let them lead. Name the objects they’re playing with, point to colors and shapes, and make silly sounds. it will all help take care of them and help them associate words with objects.
So talk to your child. Follow their lead. Play silly word games together. You might be helping their language development – and having some fun along the way.
john spencerProfessor in Psychology, University of East Anglia
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons Licence. read the original article,
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