PAY ATTENTION
Benasich says she was able to accelerate and optimize the construction of babies’ acoustic maps, as compared to those of infants who either passively listened or received no training, by rewarding the babies with a brief colorful video when they responded to changes in the rapidly varying sound patterns.
The sound changes could take just tens of milliseconds, and became more complex as the training progressed.
“While playing this fun game we can convey to the baby, ‘Pay attention to this. This is important. Now pay attention to this. This is important,'” says Benasich, “This process helps the baby to focus tightly on sounds in the environment that ‘may’ have critical information about the language they are learning.
“Previous research has shown that accurate processing of these tens-of-milliseconds differences in infancy is highly predictive of the child’s language skills at 3, 4, and 5 years.”