Brain scans show that training babies to distinguish language sounds from other sounds can speed up development in parts of the brain that are central to language skills.
Researchers taught 4-month-old babies to pay attention to increasingly complex non-language audio patterns by rewarding them for correctly shifting their eyes to a video reward when the sound changed slightly.
Their brain scans at 7 months old showed they were faster and more accurate at detecting other sounds important to language than babies who had not been exposed to the sound patterns.
The findings are detailed in a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“Young babies are constantly scanning the environment to identify sounds that might be language,” says April Benasich, who directs the Infancy Studies Laboratory at Rutgers.
“This is one of their key jobs—as between 4 and 7 months of age they are setting up their pre-linguistic acoustic maps. We gently guided the babies’ brains to focus on the sensory inputs which are most meaningful to the formation of these maps.”