Baby Crying? Don’t Talk, SING!
Infants are Soothed for Twice as Long When They Listen to Melodies Compared to Speech In this study, 30 healthy babies aged between six and nine months listened to recordings of baby talk, adult-directed speech, and ‘play’ songs in Turkish, so that they were unfamiliar with the words. When listening to songs, babies remained calm […]
Infants’ Bone Development May be Weakened by Fast Food
Medical experts from the University of Southampton in the UK have found that eating too much fast food during childhood could also lead to poor bone development (in the UK, the word “infants” is broad, including toddlers and young children). The study also focused on the diet choices of pregnant women and mothers of young […]
From Sounds to Meaning
A study conducted by the Language, Cognition and Development Lab of SISSA says that without understanding the “referential function” of language (words as “verbal labels,” symbolizing other things), it is impossible to learn a language. This implicit knowledge is already present early in infants. If we did not know that a referential relationship exists between […]
Joke with Babies and Make Them Smart
A new study says that children as young as 16 months old learn important life skills from jokes and pretend play of their parents. “The study shows just how important play is to children’s development. Parents who pretend and joke with their children offer cues to distinguish the difference between the two and toddlers take […]
Study Helps Researchers Predict if Babies Will be Psychopaths
For the first time, psychiatrists have discovered that it is possible to predict at just five weeks old whether babies will develop “callous-unemotional” traits by checking if they prefer to look at a human face or a red ball. Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits are defined as showing impaired emotion recognition, reduced responsiveness to others’ […]
The Cycle of Abuse Can be Broken with Confidence in Parenting
According to a new study, published online in the journal Child Maltreatment, mothers who experienced more kinds of abuse as children — sexual abuse, physical or emotional abuse, and physical or emotional neglect — have higher levels of self-criticism, and therefore greater doubt in their ability to be effective parents. These beliefs can manifest in […]
According to a New Brain-Wave Study, Social Babies Get More Out of Spanish Lessons
Children learn languages so easily that it’s tempting to imagine that they’re passive little sponges soaking up everything they hear, but a new study from the University of Washington shows that 10-month-old babies use their eyes as well as their ears to learn the sounds of a foreign language. The study involved 17 babies from […]
Expectations Shape Infants’ Brains
Researchers have found that infants can use their expectations about the world to rapidly shape their developing brains. Portions of babies’ brains responsible for visual processing respond not just to the presence of visual stimuli, but also to the mere expectation of visual stimuli, according to researchers from Princeton University, the University of Rochester and […]
Infants Can Think Before They Learn Words
According to a study published online in the journal Child Development, human babies can understand basic abstract relations — whether two objects are the same or different — even before they learn the words to describe such relations. Analogical ability — the ability to see common relations between objects, events or ideas — is a […]
The Speech of Other Babies Helps Infants to Learn
In a paper appearing in the journal Developmental Science, Researchers in Canada found that an attraction to infant speech sounds may help kick-start and support the crucial processes involved in learning how to talk. The discovery also offers new ways to help infants with problems such as hearing impairment that hinder the development of their […]