Launch space Toddler Newsletter - 04

Harmonious Foundations: Impact of Music, Beats, and Rhythm on Speech Development in Early Childhood

"Where words fail, music speaks"- Hans Christian Andersen.?

Still, it's interesting that research shows music is one best friend who never lets words fail.

Hello dear parents!

Congratulations on stepping into the incredible world of parenthood! It is truly an amazing journey that’s full of growth for both you and your little one. As you revel in the joy of your newborn, it is essential to remember that the initial months of a child’s life are crucial in setting the foundation for various skills, including speech development.

This article sheds light on the role music,beats and rhythm in facilitating speech development in children.

Our brain organizes sequences of sounds in a hierarchical way. This means that when we listen to things like speech or music, we recognize smaller parts first (like syllables or beats), and then combine them to understand larger structures (like words or phrases). To do this, our brain needs to efficiently process the rapidly changing sounds we hear, pick out the important information, and put it together according to the rules of language or music. This involves different cognitive functions, like paying attention to relevant details and creating temporary structures in our mind.

It's not difficult to imagine that our brain processes music in a similar way to how it processes speech. That's why exposing children to music from a very early stage, even before they are born, can have incredible effects on their ability to understand and use language later on. It can help with skills like speech development and reading.

In simpler terms, the way our brain understands and processes music is similar to how it understands and processes speech. So, exposing kids to music from a young age, including when they are still in the womb, can have a big impact on their ability to speak and read in the future.

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?Nina Kraus, PhD, is a scientist, inventor, and amateur musician who studies the biology of auditory learning and conducted research on the neural processing of speech sounds and its implications for language development[3]. Kraus's experiment revealed that infants and children with more robust and accurate neural responses to speech sounds had better language and reading skills.

Let us try to understand how introducing music, especially exposure to beats and rhythm, can benefit the child's speech and language journey.

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Beat and rhythm are fundamental elements in music, where beats are the underlying pulse that serves as the foundation for a piece of music, and rhythm refers to the patterns of sound and silence in music.

Discrimination of sounds:?

When a baby is exposed to music, the beats and rhythm are subconsciously processed in the brain. This is easy as the music follows a structure and pattern, making it easy to discriminate between tonal differences and pauses. Language and speech also use similar tonal variations and pauses to convey meanings. Initially, in speech development, a baby picks up this language structure, and music exposure also helps to differentiate differences in the auditory perception of languages.

Language acquisition?

Rhythmic patterns of the language capture a baby's initial attention, leading to speech construction. The rhythm and intonation of spoken language, often called "prosody," provide essential cues for infants to understand and acquire language. For babies who are familiar with the music, these patterns of native language as well as other languages, get internalized easily, enabling them to learn languages fast.

Multiple language learning

One of Dr Kraus's findings from her study is that musical training can partly compensate for the lack of language experience by strengthening the neural sub-cortical processing of these linguistically-relevant cues bringing them to a level similar to a native speaker, helping them become multilingual experts in the future.

Breaking down into syllables?

Infants learn to identify and segment syllables by recognizing the rhythmic patterns within words. This ability to parse speech into syllables is crucial for later language development, as it helps babies identify and reproduce sounds and words.

Imitation and repetition?

Speech development occurs mainly through imitation and repetition of adult speech. And In the perception of music and language, rhythm provides a "temporal map" with signposts to the most likely locations of meaningful input. Sensitivity to temporal patterns is critical to language acquisition since it assists in detecting word boundaries in a continuous speech stream[2]. Thus music exposure helps the baby to quickly grasp the tonal variations and pauses in languages and imitate the native language aiding in speech development.

Memorization and reproduction

As adults, we have experienced that it's easy to memorize rhythms and patterns in music. Likewise, music exposure enables the baby to remember the patterns and rhythm of language and sometimes even anticipate tonal variations. This makes speech formation in kids easier.

Bonding

One thing that goes without saying is how music brings people together. Music can strengthen the bond between the child and caregiver, and hence the child will be more attentive to the caretaker, which enhances the child's speech development.

References

1. https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/boxtrx/Intartaglia_et_al-2017-Scientific_Reports.pdf
2. https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/boxtrx/Kraus_Slater_2015.pdf
3. https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/nina-kraus.html