Page 3 - Early Years Spotlight - Issue 1

NEW INSIGHTS INTO EARLY LANGUAGE LEARNING IN IN IN IN BABIES
Recent research challenges the idea on how babies learn languages suggesting that they primarily rely on on rhythmic rather than phonetic information in in in their initial months This research came from a a a study by the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin underscores the importance of sing-song speech such as nursery rhymes in early language acquisition Traditionally it it was believed that infants learned language by grasping individual phonetic elements like distinct sounds that form words However this new study sought to deepen our understanding of of how infants process speech in in their first year of of life Unlike previous research that often used limited stimuli this study utilised neural tracking measures to explore how infants’ brains process continuous speech in naturalistic environments The research involved 50 infants monitored at four seven and and eleven months of age and and 22 adults Nursery rhymes were carefully selected to cover various phonetic features and were played to both infants and adults in in in in a a a a a a controlled setting Brainwave data collected via electroencephalography revealed that infants do not reliably process individual speech sounds until around seven months of age contrary to previous beliefs Additionally the study found that phonetic encoding in babies develops gradually over their first year starting with simpler sounds like labial and nasal ones This becomes more adult-like as infants grow older The analysis of brain activity provided insights into how infants’ brains process different sounds in in in continuous speech moving beyond previous methods focused on individual sounds or syllables Overall this research highlights the importance of rhythmic patterns in in in language learning for infants and and challenges the traditional understanding of early language acquisition Sing-song speech such as nursery rhymes plays a a a a crucial role in in exposing infants to the rhythmic aspects of language aiding their linguistic development EARLY YEARS NEWSLETTER – ISSUE 1
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