What auditioning does for babies
Reading aloud and singing are said to promote language development in babies. Researchers from Vienna have investigated how babies' brains react to songs such as "Bi-Ba-Butzemann" or "Schlaf, Kindlein schlaf" and which songs have a positive influence on later language development.
In order to promote babies' language development as early as possible, parents are advised to talk to their offspring as much as possible, read to them or sing to them. Singing to children should also help them to develop a sense of rhythm at an early age and to move accordingly. But what influence does the choice of song have? A research team from the University of Vienna together with scientists from the University of East London has now been able to show that faster, more complex lullabies have a different effect on children's vocabulary and their ability to process music than slower, simpler lullabies. The results were published in "Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience".
In the study, mothers sang two well-known nursery rhymes to their seven-month-old babies - the lullaby "Schlaf, Kindlein schlaf" and the play song "Es tanzt ein Bi-Ba-Butzemann". While play songs are characterised by a faster rhythm, more complexity and higher pitches, lullabies have a slower tempo, less musical variation and lower pitches. Using electroencephalography (EEG), the researchers measured the brain activity of the 30 infants studied while they sang the two songs in order to find out how they perceived and neurally processed the pieces of music. "Our results showed that the babies found it easier to track the lullaby with their brain activity," says Trinh Nguyen, first author of the study from the University of Vienna in a press release. According to the researcher, the brain waves reflected the sound of the song. She and her colleagues concluded that the slower tempo and simpler structure of the lullaby made it easier for the children to track. They also found that neural tracking of lullabies was weaker when the infants were not looking at the mothers, suggesting that neural tracking was related to the infants' attention to the face of the person singing to them.
In addition, the research team observed whether the infants responded to the songs by rocking or kicking. "The infants showed more rhythmic movements during the play song," explains Trinh Nguyen. According to the authors, the faster song apparently stimulated the children more to move to the music. The infants also looked at their mothers significantly longer during the play song than during the lullaby.
Nguyen and colleagues also investigated a possible influence on language acquisition: When the children were 20 months old, the parents were asked about their infants' vocabulary using a questionnaire. The results showed that only neuronal tracking in combination with rhythmic movements had a positive effect on the size of the vocabulary during the play song, but not during the lullaby. According to the authors, the acoustic variability of play songs therefore appears to promote language acquisition. However, no other potential factors influencing children's language development were investigated in these studies. It was also not determined how often and which songs were sung to the children at home. In further studies, the research team wants to investigate which musical elements such as pitch, tempo and timbre are particularly stimulating for babies and promote children's cognitive and linguistic development.
Spectrum of Science
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