2023-05-15 21:13:37
Verbal interactions between adults and babies participate in structuring the baby’s brain, according to several researchers.
Talking to babies from an early stage could play a role in healthy brain development, according to British researchers who published the results of their study in the specialist journal The Journal of Neuroscience and relayed by The Guardian.
While it had already been established that talking to young children allowed them to develop better oral comprehension and their vocabulary, researchers have discovered a link between the amount of verbal interaction between adults and children and the concentration of a substance in the brain, called myelin.
Myelin, comparable to a sheath that would cover an electric wire, is a membrane that will allow isolate and protect certain nerve fibers in the brain. In particular, it makes it possible to accelerate the conduction of nerve messages.
“The conclusion is clear: talk to your children! These exchanges literally allow the brain to build itself,” says John Spencer, an American researcher who is the lead author of the study.
John Spencer and his team carried out their study with 87 babies around six months old and 76 aged around two and a half years. Thanks to a recording device integrated into a vest that the babies wore, the researchers captured more than 6,200 hours of linguistic data.
The parents of 84 of the participating babies brought them to the hospital so that, during a nap, the researchers could take MRI scans to measure the amount of myelin in the children’s brains.
Potential genetic effect
In two-and-a-half-year-old children whose parents talked to them a lot, the researchers observed a greater concentration of myelin in areas of the brain related to language.
But the surprise for the researchers is that in six-month-old babies, a greater amount of verbal interaction was instead associated with lower myelin concentrations.
“At six months the brain is growing and new neurons are multiplying, but talking to babies can help prolong this period of brain growth,” explains John Spencer.
“At 30 months the brain is in a different state, it starts to reduce cell growth and form more specific connections: this is where myelin comes in. What would be interesting is to see if children at six months who show these negative relationships become at 30 months those who show a positive relationship,” the researcher continued.
However, Saloni Krishnan, a cognitive neuroscientist at Royal Holloway University in London interviewed by British media The Guardian, explains that it is also likely that “children exposed to more language at home and producing more myelin will also have inherited genes from more linguistically gifted parents”. It is thus necessary “to test this potential genetic effect before being able to attribute it to the linguistic environment, she reacted to the study.
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