14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent study, experts discovered that unborn children's cognition stands to gain considerably if their mothers talk to them constantly. Spoken words apparently have a very strong effect on their minds, even if they themselves are unable to speak until much later on. The investigators say that the sound of a mother's voice has a much more significant influence on a child's cognition than even musical tones, which were already known to produce positive effects on the undeveloped mind.
For their experiments, researchers at the Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, decided to investigate a number of 3-month-old infants, and subjected them to a battery of tests. Some of the participants were made to listen to music, or sequences of tones, whereas another group was made to listen to spoken words. According to the team behind the study, the latter group fared significantly better in cognitive tasks than the former. Children who heard words also exhibited evidence of categorization, whereas members of the other group did not.
“For infants as young as three months of age, words exert a special influence that supports the ability to form a category. These findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories,” says NU Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Psychology Department associate professor of psychology Susan Hespos. She was one of the three team leaders for the new study, alongside colleagues Alissa Ferry and Sandra Waxman, and is also one of the authors of a paper accompanying the findings, which will appear in the March/April edition of the respected scientific journal Child Development.
“We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorization. We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning,” concludes Waxman, who is also a professor of psychology at Northwestern, and an author of the journal entry.