Parents may want to babble and sing as much as possible, even if it means looking silly for a moment. Researchers discovered that doing baby talk and singing nursery rhymes can be beneficial for a baby's development.
Scholars from Cambridge University lead by Dr. Victoria Leong told BBC that babies learn best when they are in sync with their parents. For a baby, particularly newborns, the adult's way of speech is still out of grasp which makes it more laborious to learn new things around them.
Dr. Leong and team conducted the study by scanning moms and babies' brains during bonding. When the mother and baby's brain waves are not in tune, babies learned significantly less and vice versa.
The researchers also found out that a mother's soothing voice called as motherese can act like magic in keeping a baby's attention, thus, urging the inclination to learn. The scholars particularly focused on mother and child interaction which is why it isn't conclusive on fathers and other carers' parts, like parents or siblings.
Even though most adults think that babbling is harder to understand, it's proven otherwise for babies. In fact, the researchers found out that motherese or baby talk can sound cleared for the little ones. Moreover, it was found out that the more motherese is done, the more a baby learns.
He is so wise. #BabyTalk pic.twitter.com/TY6XElFsfT
— David Lopez (@davidlopezfilms) November 5, 2016
The group of researchers may have suggested that motherese is beneficial to a baby's development but another school of thought has suggested otherwise. According to Daily Mail, baby talk is detrimental to the little ones so as they could easily learn how languages work.
Experts from Laboratory for Language Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute based in Tokyo, Japan advised that parents should just speak to a baby clearly. This meant no baby talk strange voice and not even the sing-song motherese way.
In contrast to Dr. Leong and team's findings, the RIKEN researchers also noted that babies who have been exposed to the clear utterance of words grew up to have larger vocabularies. These babies also tend to be brighter than their motherese-exposed counterparts as they were easily able to make new friends and converse using adult speech.
What do you think is the most effective way of speaking to a child? Let us know what you think about this by commenting below!
