Here's How Human Speech Influences Your Baby

The notion of the "word gap" has been thrown around for many years--the idea that parents of impoverished homes speak to their children less, which may later predicts difficulty with academic achievement and financial success.

The future article "Listen Up! Speech Is for Thinking During Infancy" to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences examines the scope of the issue by assessing this impact on human speech of infant cognition in the first year of life.

"It's not because [children] have low vocabularies that they fail to achieve later on. That's far too simple," said Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology, a professor of cognitive psychology and a fellow in the University's Institute for Policy Research, in a news release. "The vocabulary of a child -- raised in poverty or in plenty -- is really an index of the larger context in which language participates."

A series of new findings from the article reveal that listening to speech can help to promote more than language-learning alone. More specifically, when noticing patterns or regularities among the sounds or objects that surround them, infants can become more successful than peers while establishing certain coherent categories of objects and events.

"These new results, culled from several different labs including our own, tell us that infants as young as 2 or 3 months of age not only love to listen to speech, but that they learn about fundamental cognitive and social relations better in the context of listening to speech than in any other context we've discovered yet. Nobody would have thought that," Waxman concluded. "This early tuned sensitivity to human language has positive, cascading developmental consequences that go way beyond learning language."

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