How the goo-gaa talks you have with your baby helps their brain

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According to studies, all that baby talk you do with your newborn is actually beneficial for their brain development.

Research suggests that the quantity of adult speech infants hear in their early years may help influence brain development. Additionally, it can aid increase their language processing and vocabulary.

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Researchers claim to have discovered a link between the quantity of adult speech babies are exposed to and the concentration of myelin, a material in the brain that surrounds neurons and improves signal efficiency.

Lead author of the study Prof. John Spencer of the University of East Anglia says, “I think the take-home message is, absolutely talk to your kids. And it matters,” adding that “What’s pretty striking here is that it’s literally shaping the structure of the brain.”

Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Spencer and colleagues detailed how they utilized a device hidden within a vest to record the amount of speech that 87 babies between the ages of six and thirty months were exposed to at home.

The researchers collected 6,208 hours of language data and discovered that children with more educated moms were exposed to more adult speech and made more vocalizations.

The crew then brought 84 of the children to the hospital, where they slept in a designated quiet room.

“Once the kids were asleep, we basically crept in like ninjas and lifted the child up and put them on to a trolley and transported them into the MRI scanning room,” stated Spencer.

The MRI images were then utilized to calculate the quantity of myelin in the children's brains.

Speech and myelination

Myelin production rises as the brain matures. However, the researchers discovered that higher levels of myelin in language-related circuits in the brain were connected with higher levels of adult speech in 30-month-olds.

In contrast, higher levels of adult speech were related to lower levels of myelin in six-month-olds.

While the latter was surprising, Spencer stated that one possible reason is that the influence of speech is dependent on the stage of development of the brain.

“When you’re six months old more input is good. But at that point, your brain is growing massively and you get this massive growth of new neurons,” he said. “So the input comes in and may help prolong that period of brain growth.”

Spencer noted, however, that at 30 months the brain is in a different state. “Now, it’s starting to prune back some of the cell growth, form specific connections and that’s where myelin comes in. So now the input starts to help structure the myelin,” he said.

The researchers noted that both age groups of children of more educated mothers had stronger associations at least in the right hemisphere of the brain, with Spencer saying more research was needed. 

“The cool thing will be if the six-month-old kids who show that negative relationships turn into 30-month-old kids who show a positive relationship,” he said.

Dr. Saloni Krishna, a professor in cognitive neuroscience at Royal Holloway, University of London, who was not involved in the study, said the research produced novel findings but cautioned that it does not prove more speech causes more myelination, noting that the opposite was true for children aged about six months.

“It is not yet clear if greater myelination in these areas is meaningful for future language or cognitive development, or if this a stable pattern across childhood,” she said.

Krishnan also noticed that individual disparities in linguistic skills are connected to heredity.

“Children who are exposed to more language at home and have higher myelination will also have inherited genes from parents who are more linguistically able. We need to test for this potential genetic effect before we can attribute it to the linguistic environment,” she said.