Cooing at a newborn baby is not just a sign of affection – scientists think it is vital part of teaching them to speak.
Exaggerated vowels that experts call ‘motherese’ – the ‘goos’ and ‘gaas’ that can be infuriating to non-parents – are a key part of the learning process, a new study suggests.
Exposing infants to clear vocal sounds from birth helps them distinguish language from other noises, the researchers suggest.
They found that babies aged seven months can differentiate voices from other sounds – even when they cannot see the person speaking.
By the age of 11 months, before they can speak themselves, the children have already learned to differentiate their mother tongue from other languages, the scientists discovered.
The American research team monitoring the brain waves of babies while playing them a series of recorded words in different languages.
At the age of seven months the part of the babies’ brains associated with language would activate whenever they heard a human voice.
Four months later the same brain region would only go into action when they heard a word in their parents’ language.
The study, by academics at the University of Washington, serves as evidence that speaking to infants at a very early age is vital for their development.
And the authors say the long, clear vowels that parents babble at their newborns is a key part of the process.
The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said: ‘Based on the present study’s results, we speculate that motherese speech, with its exaggerated acoustic and articulatory features, particularly in one-on-one settings, enhances the activation of motor brain areas and the generation of internal motor models of speech.’
The babies’ neural activity suggest the part of the brain used to speak is already working before a child learns to talk.
Professor Patricia Kuhl, who led the project, said: ‘Most babies babble by seven months, but don’t utter their first words until after their first birthdays.
‘Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start and suggests that seven-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words.’
Professor Kuhl said that the exaggerated ‘goos’ and ‘gaas’ that parents speak to their babies are very important.
‘When infants hear it, their brains may find it easier to model the motor movements necessary to speak,’ she said.
‘Hearing us talk exercises the action areas of infants’ brains, going beyond what we thought happens when we talk to them.
‘Infants’ brains are preparing them to act on the world by practising how to speak before they actually say a word.’
When they played the recordings the researchers, who tracked the brain activity of 57 babies, saw elevated activity in the superior temporal gyrus – the part of the brain which processes language.
They also saw activity in brain regions called Broca’s area and the cerebellum – which are responsible for the motor movements required for producing speech.
