Music stimulates babies and plays an active role in brain development and language ability. It doesn't have to be Mozart music (because of the famous Mozart effect) or even classical music, any type of music, from pop to ethnic, favors the learning of speech in babies.
Researchers at the Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS) at the University of Washington have shown in an experiment that children who play to keep up with the music improve their cognitive abilities.
The key is to put music in your life since they are very young, since in addition to being entertaining and stimulating, children who play to keep up with the music improve their cognitive abilities. Like music, language has strong rhythmic patterns, and it is precisely the ability to identify differences in speech sounds that helps babies learn to speak.
According to the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early musical experiences can have a more global effect on baby intelligence.
In Babies and morePon music in your children's lives: nine benefits of music in babies and childrenInvestigators They divided 39 9-month-old babies into two groups that attended, for a month with their parents, 12 15-minute play sessions. Twenty were assigned to the music group, which played children's songs while a researcher guided the babies and their parents to set the pace with the music. All the songs were in ternary rhythm, as in a waltz.
The remaining 19, who were part of the control group, attended a game session without music. Instead, they played with toy cars, blocks and other objects that required coordinated movements.
After several sessions, the researchers analyzed the effects through magnetoencephalography (MEG), a brain scanner that allows you to see the exact location and timing of brain activity. Two regions of the brain, the auditory cortex and the prefrontal cortex, were identified as important for cognitive abilities such as attention control and pattern detection.
The babies in the music group had stronger brain responses for disruption of the rhythm of music and speech in the auditory and prefrontal cortex, compared to babies in the control group. This suggests that Participation in music play sessions improved babies' ability to detect sound patterns, ability that favors speech learning.
In Babies and more A new benefit of music in children: learning to play the piano helps them acquire language
