While prior studies have examined the impact singing and speech have on infants’ attention, study co-author Isabelle Peretz, a professor at the University of Montreal in Canada, explained that the team “wanted to know how they affect a baby’s emotional self-control”, Medical News Today reported. This is obviously not yet developed in infants & they believed that singing would help babies & children develop it. Amazingly, the effect proved true even when the song was sung in an entirely foreign language than that of the mother – in this case, Turkish. But according to a new study, singing may be a much more effective strategy.
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During a recent study conducted by the University of Montreal, scientists have discovered that the traditional “baby-talk” can actually induce more stress in an infant than singing.
Although infants do not display the same behaviour, the results of the study suggest “the babies did get carried away by the music”, which suggests they do have the mental capacity to synchronise, the researchers said.
Many parents will know that singing or talking to their baby when they become distressed or agitated helps to calm them down. Firstly, both the speech (“baby talk” and adult-directed) and the music presented to infants were produced in Turkish, so that the song and language were unfamiliar.
The study involved thirty healthy infants aged between six and nine months.
However, despite the songs played in the second experiment being in a language that was familiar to the infants, they did not keep them calm for as long as the Turkish songs played in the first experiment, at 6 minutes compared with 9 minutes.
“The performer sang Turkish play songs, not Western ones”, said Mariève Corbeil, the lead author who published their findings in the journal Infancy. Parents of the infant participants sat behind them to avoid influencing their child’s reactions. Baby-talk kept them calm for just over four minutes, on average; for adult-directed speech, it was just under four minutes.
Researchers also explained that recordings of melodious music could always come in handy when the parents themselves were not good at singing those tunes. Cry face is described as the most common facial expression of distress in every infant, the researchers said. The infants were exposed to recordings instead of live performances in order to make sure all children had comparable performances & there was no social interaction between the children and performer.
Calm infants who listened to music managed to stay calm for about 9 minutes, whereas those who were exposed to direct speech – regardless of whether or not it was baby speech – only managed to remain calm for about 4 minutes.
“These findings speak to the intrinsic importance of music, and of nursery rhymes in particular, which appeal to our desire for simplicity, and repetition.”
Each baby had to listen to the recording until they displayed a cry face.
Though distress signals from infants often prompt immediate intervention from parent to comfort the baby, a few parents could be at risk and move between the two extremes of intense response and infant abuse or neglect.
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In other words, the nursery rhymes that parents sing for their kids still seem to be one of the best options available for calming them down.
