Music and speech – two peas in a baby’s brain pod 🧠🎶👶🏼
In this study they found that 9 month old babies who had one month of exposure to directed music listening improved not only their auditory processing of music but also their language. So little time, so much benefit! 🧠🎶🗣
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The questions is why is it that music and music activities help a baby develop their language skills? The authors put forward the notion that between the ages of 3-6 months babies benefit from what they call an enriched auditory environment. The type of enrichment they looked at was music and a foreign language. You might think this is a lot of auditory information for a young baby to process. But both music and a foreign language full of patterns of sound, and it turns out that being exposed to lots of different patterns actually helps babies to determine which patterns are part of their native language and which patterns are not.
At this age babies hear language as if it was music so in a way they are identifying which song is their song. It seems counterintuitive but it may be that the more varied the sound patterns a baby can be exposed to the more quickly they can seperate which pattern belongs to which language (spoken or music). If you are interested in reading more jump through this article to the second last paragraph and read more.