Months before their first words, babies’ brains rehearse speech mechanics

Infants can tell the difference between sounds of all languages until about 8 months of age when their brains start to focus only on the sounds they hear around them. It’s been unclear how this transition occurs, but social interactions and caregivers’ use of exaggerated “parentese” style of speech seem to help.

University of Washington research in 7- and 11-month-old infants shows that speech sounds stimulate areas of the brain that coordinate and plan motor movements for speech.

The study, published July 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that baby brains start laying down the groundwork of how to form words long before they actually begin to speak, and this may affect the developmental transition.

“Most babies babble by 7 months, but don’t utter their first words until after their first birthdays,” said lead author Patricia Kuhl, who is the co-director of the UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. “Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start and suggests that 7-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words.”

Kuhl and her research team believe this practice at motor planning contributes to the transition when infants become more sensitive to their native language.

The results emphasize the importance of talking to kids during social interactions even if they aren’t talking back yet.

“Hearing us talk exercises the action areas of infants’ brains, going beyond what we thought happens when we talk to them,” Kuhl said. “Infants’ brains are preparing them to act on the world by practicing how to speak before they actually say a word.”

In the experiment, infants sat in a brain scanner that measures brain activation through a noninvasive technique called magnetoencephalography. Nicknamed MEG, the brain scanner resembles an egg-shaped vintage hair dryer and is completely safe for infants. The Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences was the first in the world to use such a tool to study babies while they engaged in a task.

The babies, 57 7- and 11- or 12-month-olds, each listened to a series of native and foreign language syllables such as “da” and “ta” as researchers recorded brain responses. They listened to sounds in English and in Spanish.

The researchers observed brain activity in an auditory area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus, as well as in Broca’s area and the cerebellum, cortical regions responsible for planning the motor movements required for producing speech.

This pattern of brain activation occurred for sounds in the 7-month-olds’ native language (English) as well as in a non-native language (Spanish), showing that at this early age infants are responding to all speech sounds, whether or not they have heard the sounds before.

In the older infants, brain activation was different. By 11-12 months, infants’ brains increase motor activation to the non-native speech sounds relative to native speech, which the researchers interpret as showing that it takes more effort for the baby brain to predict which movements create non-native speech. This reflects an effect of experience between 7 and 11 months, and suggests that activation in motor brain areas is contributing to the transition in early speech perception.

The study has social implications, suggesting that the slow and exaggerated parentese speech – “Hiiiii! How are youuuuu?” – may actually prompt infants to try to synthesize utterances themselves and imitate what they heard, uttering something like “Ahhh bah bah baaah.”

“Parentese is very exaggerated, and when infants hear it, their brains may find it easier to model the motor movements necessary to speak,” Kuhl said.

Study shows moving together builds bonds from the time we learn to walk

Whether they march in unison, row in the same boat or dance to the same song, people who move in time with one another are more likely to bond and work together afterward.

It’s a principle established by previous studies, but now researchers at McMaster have shown that moving in time with others even affects the social behaviour of babies who have barely learned to walk.

“Moving in sync with others is an important part of musical activities,” says Laura Cirelli, lead author of a paper now posted online and scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Developmental Science. “These effects show that movement is a fundamental part of music that affects social behavior from a very young age.”

Cirelli and her colleagues in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour showed that 14-month-old babies were much more likely to help another person after the experience of bouncing up and down in time to music with that person.

Cirelli and fellow doctoral student Kate Einarson worked under the supervision of Professor Laurel Trainor, a specialist in child development research.

They tested 68 babies in all, to see if bouncing to music with another person makes a baby more likely to assist that person by handing back “accidentally” dropped objects.

Working in pairs, one researcher held a baby in a forward-facing carrier and stood facing the second researcher. When the music started to play, both researchers would gently bounce up and down, one bouncing the baby with them. Some babies were bounced in sync with the researcher across from them, and others were bounced at a different tempo.

When the song was over, the researcher who had been facing the baby then performed several simple tasks, including drawing a picture with a marker. While drawing the picture, she would pretend to drop the marker to see whether the infant would pick it up and hand it back to her – a classic test of altruism in babies.

The babies who had been bounced in time with the researcher were much more likely to toddle over, pick up the object and pass it back to the researcher, compared to infants who had been bounced at a different tempo than the experimenter.

While babies who had been bounced out of sync with the researcher only picked up and handed back 30 per cent of the dropped objects, in-sync babies came to the researcher’s aid 50 per cent of the time. The in-sync babies also responded more quickly.

The findings suggest that when we sing, clap, bounce or dance in time to music with our babies, these shared experiences of synchronous movement help form social bonds between us and our babies.

It’s a significant finding, Cirelli believes, because it shows that moving together to music with others encourages the development of altruistic helping behaviour among those in a social group. It suggests that music is an important part of day care and kindergarten curriculums because it helps to build a co-operative social climate.

Cirelli is now researching whether the experience of synchronous movement with one person leads babies to extend their increased helpfulness to other people or whether infants reserve their altruistic behaviour for their dancing partners.

New Study Shows Limited Motor Skills In Early Infancy May Be Trait of Autism

Researchers from Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Md., announced findings that provide evidence for reduced grasping and fine motor activity among six-month-old infants with an increased familial risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The research, which was published in Child Development, has important implications for our overall understanding of ASDs. Furthermore, the results suggest that subtle lags in object exploration-related motor skills in early infancy may present an ASD endophenotype - a heritable characteristic that may have genetic relation to ASD without predicting a full diagnosis- and further our understanding of the genes involved in the disorder.

“Among the infants with familial history of ASD, many were shown to have reduced fine motor skills regardless of eventual ASD diagnosis,” says Dr. Rebecca Landa, lead author and director of Kennedy Krieger’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders. “This means that reduced fine motor skills could be an ASD endophenotype without predicting full diagnosis. Identifying potential endophenotypes has important implications for future research and may improve our understanding of the neurobiology and genetics of ASDs.”

Researchers conducted two experiments examining the correlation of early motor development and object exploration in children with low risk (LR) or high risk (HR) of developing an ASD. Researchers measured key early learning skills, such as object manipulation and grasping activity, in infants at six months of age and again at 10 months. While all infants scored within the expected range and showed no difference in terms of their object manipulation, there were subtle signs that showed reduced grasping activity in HR infants as compared to their LR age-peers. These findings demonstrate that regardless of developmental outcomes, early motor skill differences in HR infants may represent an endophenotype that can be linked to ASD.

About Experiment 1

In experiment 1, participants included 129 infants, largely consisting of infant siblings of children with confirmed ASD diagnoses. During the testing period, most participants were six months old and were then followed longitudinally to the age of 36 months. Infants completed an assessment using the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL), which is a standardized assessment tool providing scores in five categories: Gross Motor (GM); Fine Motor (FM); Visual Reception (VR); Receptive Language (RL); and Expressive Language (EL). Based on the results of this assessment, infants were then divided into four groups : low-risk (LR) infants without ASD; high-risk (HR) infants without ASD, language, or social delays; HR infants showing language or social delays but not ASD; and HR infants with autism or ASD diagnosis. All children in the HR ASD group met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for the disorder.

All four groups in Experiment 1 scored within the typical range on the MSEL subtests, meaning that none exhibited a clinical delay in their overall fine motor development at age six months. Subtle differences between HR and LR infants emerged even in HR infants who did not receive a diagnosis of ASD or other delays by age 36 months, which suggests that lower fine motor scores on the MSEL are characteristic of infants at high familial risk for ASD. In order to examine whether the HR infants would catch up to the LR infants in time, researchers conducted a second experiment with new participants.

About Experiment 2

Experiment 2 focused on a new group of six-month-old infants in both LR and HR categories and examined only their grasping behaviors in a naturalistic, free-play context, which was an important factor that emerged in Experiment 1. Participants included 42 infants who were siblings of children with ASD. The infants were observed in an unstructured play session.

The results of Experiment 2 showed reduced grasping and object exploration activity in six-month-old infants at HR for ASD. Overall, the MSEL FM T-score results observed in Experiment 2 show a similar pattern as in Experiment 1, but statistical results are somewhat weakened by an effect of gender in the LR sample. Unique to Experiment 2, was the sole focus on object manipulation-related items of the MSEL, which offered a consistent measure to identify differences between HR and LR infants. Reduced grasping activity in HR infants at age 6 months was also observed during an unstructured free-play task in Experiment 2, which provides additional evidence for the findings observed in Experiment 1. However, the HR infants caught up to the LR group in grasping, as measured in this study, by 10 months of age.

Future studies are needed to examine these preliminary findings more closely to specifically assess grasping ability in infants that receive an ASD diagnosis later in life.

(Image: Bigstock)

A ‘hands-on’ approach could help babies develop spatial awareness

A study from the Department of Psychology published today found:

• Changes in the way the brain processes touch in the first year of life
• Babies start keeping track of their hands are when their arms move around from 8 months
• Crossing the hands confuses the mind in young babies
• The way we perceive touch in the outside world develops in the first year of life

The research, from Goldsmiths’ InfantLab, suggested that babies’ tactile experiences could be important for developing their sense of place in the world around them.

The InfantLab research team carried out their study on 66 babies aged from six to ten months old.

Babies felt harmless ‘buzzes’ on their arms

In the study, babies felt little tactile ‘buzzes’ on their hands first with their arms in an uncrossed position and then in a crossed position, while their brain activity was recorded through an EEG (electroencephalography) sensor net.

This is one of the first pieces of research to focus on the development of ‘touch perception’, which is crucial for investigating how babies learn to perceive how their own bodies fit into the world around them.

Dr Andy Bremner, InfantLab Director, explained: “We discovered that it takes time for babies to build up good mechanisms for perceiving how they fit into the outside world. Specifically, early on they do not appear to perceive the ways in which the body changes when their limbs, in this case their arms, move around.” 

Dr Silvia Rigato, researcher on the project, commented: “The vast majority of previous studies on infant perception has focussed on what babies perceive of a visual environment on a screen and out of reach, giving us a picture of what babies can do and understand when in couch potato mode.”

“Our research has taken this a step further. As adults we need good maps of where our bodies and limbs are in order to be able to act and move around competently. It seems these take time to develop in the first year, and we didn’t know that before.”

The full research paper ‘The neural basis of somatosensory remapping develops in human infancy’ was published in the journal Current Biology.

First brain images of African infants enable research into cognitive effects of nutrition

Brain activity of babies in developing countries could be monitored from birth to reveal the first signs of cognitive dysfunction, using a new technique piloted by a London-based university collaboration.

The cognitive function of infants can be visualised and tracked more quickly, more accurately and more cheaply using the method, called functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS), compared to the behavioural assessments Western regions have relied upon for decades.

Professor Clare Elwell, Professor of Medical Physics at University College London (UCL), said: “Brain activity soon after birth has barely been studied in low-income countries, because of the lack of transportable brain imaging facilities needed to do this at any reasonable scale. We have high hopes of building on these promising findings to develop functional near infra-red spectroscopy into an assessment tool for investigating cognitive function of infants who may be at risk of malnutrition or childhood diseases associated with low income settings.”

The pioneering study, published this week in Nature Scientific Reports, was performed by a collaboration of researchers from UCL; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; the Babylab at Birkbeck, University of London; and the Medical Research Council unit in Gambia. It aimed to investigate the impact of nutrition in resource-poor regions on infant brain development, and was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Professor Clare Elwell (UCL Medical Physics & Bioengineering), said: “This is the first use of brain imaging methods to investigate localised brain activity in African infants.

"Until now, much of our understanding of brain development in low income countries has relied upon behavioural assessments which need careful cultural and linguistic translations to ensure they are accurate. Our technology, functional near infrared spectroscopy, can provide a more objective marker of brain activity."

For the studies in the Gambia, babies aged 4–8 months old were played sounds and shown videos of adults performing specific movements, such as playing ‘peek-a-boo’. The fNIRS system monitored changes in blood flow to the baby’s brain and showed that distinct brain regions responded to visual–social prompts, while others responded to auditory-social stimuli. Comparison of the results with those obtained from babies in the UK showed that the responses were similar in both groups.

fNIRS has previously been used to study brain development in UK infants and most recently to investigate early markers of autism during the first few months of life.

Professor Andrew Prentice (Medical Research Council International Nutrition Group, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) said: “Humans have evolved to survive and succeed on the basis of their large brain and intelligence, but nutritional deficits in early life can limit this success. In order to plan the best interventions to maximise brain function we need tools that can give us an early read out. fNIRS is showing great promise in this respect.”