You might feel silly talking to a baby who can hardly focus their eyes, much less understand English, but a new study suggests that talking to babies from a very early age has a big influence on their cognitive development. ”We suspect that human speech and, perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorizations,” says researcher Sandra Waxman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University in a press release. ”We propose that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words form fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning.”
The study, published in “Child Development” compared the effects of words vs. sounds on infant cognition skills in a group of 46 three to four month old infants.
All of the babies were shown a series of pictures of animals that were paired with either words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told things like “Look at the tom!” – a made-up word for fish – while they viewed corresponding pictures. Babies in the other group heard a series of beeps that matched the word phrases in tone and duration – closely duplicating the sound of the word but without the meaning behind it.
Then both groups were tested on their ability to recognize categories. Each baby was shown a picture of a different animal in the same category that they’d been shown before side by side with a picture of a dinosaur. Researchers measured how long their subjects looked at each image. If the baby had formed a familiar category in their brain with the animal from the first exercise, they would look at one of the pictures longer than the other. The result was clear, infants who heard words with the pictures had formed categories for their animal, those who heard just sounds had not.
