News
Talking to your baby boosts their brainpower
25 Mar 2010
The study by Northwestern University in Illinois found that babies who heard words were able to categorise them, whereas babies who heard just simple tone noises did not.
Almost 50 three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with either words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told, for example, "Look at the toma!" - a made up word for fish, as they looked at each picture, said the researchers. Infants in the other group heard a series of beeps which were matched to the word phrases for tone and duration.
Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. Looking at the fish longer than the dinosaur demonstrated they had categorised the fish in their minds, the journal Child Development reports.
Dr Susan Hespos, associate professor of psychology at the university and one of the authors of the study, described the results as "striking", and went on to say "we found that although infants who heard in the word and tone groups saw exactly the same pictures for exactly the same amount of time, those who heard words formed the category fish and those who heard tones did not. For infants as young as three months of age, words exert a special influence that supports the ability to form a category and these findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories."
Co-author Professor Sandra Waxman, also from the psychology department, added: "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 categorisation. We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning."
The research will appear in the April edition of the journal Child Development.
(Article extracted from various sources including Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail)
