Talking to Premature Babies Benefits their Language and Thinking Skills: Study

Parents should talk to premature babies as it helps increase their interactive and cognitive skills, says a recent study.  

The study is published in the Journal Pediatrics.

Researchers observed 36 babies who were born premature (born between 32 and 36 weeks) and in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  They recorded background sounds, interaction of parents, hospital staff and the number of words spoken to the babies that also included singing, for over 16 hours. They also considered interactions among doctors and nurses, parents and hospital staff, which were not spoken directly to the babies. 

The babies born at 36 weeks were exposed to more talking than the ones born at 32 weeks. The average amount of words these children were exposed was between 144 to 26,000 words. These were compared with Bayley-III scores that measure motor, language and thinking progress of children aged between 7 and 18 months.

 The analysis showed that adult word count per hour had an effect of 12 percent in language scores and 20 percent variation in their communication score when these children were 18 months of age. For those born after 36 weeks, the interaction from adults and parents had 26 percent variation in cognitive composite scores at 7 months age.

Dr Betty Vohr, study author from Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University said, "This is certainly a remarkable, easy-to-implement and cost-effective intervention of informing moms of visiting their children in the intensive care unit." reports Reuters.

The research says that greater interaction by parents with the infants in the NICU is linked to development of language and thinking skills.  Before their birth, babies inside the womb are exposed to the mother's voice and are familiar to it.  Babies in the NICU are exposed to noises from monitors and machine but to very little human interaction. Previous research has shown that preemies are at an increased risk of language and communication problems but, it was unclear how it affected them.  This claims to be the first study showing the effects of early interaction on prematurely born children in the NICU.

Dr Hiedi Fledman, child development expert at Stanford University of Medicine told Reuters Health, "I really think that talking to children is a really good thing to do. Some of us start when our children are in utero. Sometimes our children come when they should still be in utero."