The little ones look at us carefully when we talk, when we sing, when we hum. They look at the mouth and it seems that they want to move it like we do, they want to imitate us, they want to talk. And, in a way, they do. Babies "speak" in their mind before uttering their first words, as a recent study has shown.
Social interactions and the "exaggerated" style with which babies are usually spoken helps them to their linguistic ability: speech sounds stimulate brain areas responsible for coordinating and planning speech movements at seven months, when they only babble.
This is a study published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science", prepared by researchers at the Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. It states that, simply by listening, the baby's brain is activated to try to figure out how the correct movements are made to articulate.
It is a brain mechanism that begins around seven months of the baby, just when children begin to be more sensitive to their mother tongue (or languages), distinguishing it from other foreign languages.
In the experiment, the authors measured the brain activity of babies through a non-invasive technique called magnetoencephalography. The little ones, five to seven months old and 11 or 12 months old, heard a series of syllables from native and foreign languages, English and Spanish, such as "da" and "ta", and the researchers recorded their brain responses.
Thus, they saw brain activity in an auditory area of the brain called 'superior temporal gyrus', as well as in cortical regions responsible for planning the motor movements necessary for speech production.
In infants aged 11 to 12 months, the activation of the brain was different: the motor area is activated more intensely for the sounds of non-native speech versus native speech, because more effort is needed to predict which movements the speech creates. native
We already knew how important it is to speak to children from the beginning (even before birth), but it is good to continue researching on the procedures of language perception by babies.
In short, do not stop talking to your little one like a baby, to sing her babysitters, to tell her stories… because The baby's brain is actively preparing to surprise us with its first and expected words. It is fascinating the ability they have since they were so young and sure that future research continues to surprise us.
