Why reading nursery rhymes and singing to babies may help them to learn language

Researchers find that babies don’t begin to process phonetic information reliably until seven months old which they say is too late to form the foundation of language.

Researchers say parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible. That’s because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months. 

Phonetic information – the smallest sound elements of speech, typically represented by the alphabet – is considered by many linguists to be the foundation of language. Infants are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. But a new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case.

Instead, rhythmic speech helps babies learn language by emphasising the boundaries of individual words and is effective even in the first months of life.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year.

Their study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, found that phonetic information wasn’t successfully encoded until seven months old, and was still sparse at 11 months old when babies began to say their first words.

Here the full article.

More on this research

Di Liberto et al. "Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life", Nature Communications DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43490-x