Music and Your Infant's Brain Development
Music.
Does it positively affect an infant's brain in any significant way?
People across cultures and from the earliest known history have used lullabies to soothe infants.
But does playing music or singing also benefit the development of our infant's brain?
Is it simply pleasurable for us to play music when we are wanting something to distract us
in the middle of the night
when feeding, burping, changing, and rocking our infant back to sleep?
Or is there some bigger, even better reason for that music to play in the background?
During a child’s window of development from birth to age 1, music can serve a variety of important purposes.
According to Hayne W. Reese's "Advances in Child Development and Behavior"
(cited in 'The Effects of Music on Infant Development,' by Linda Tarr Kent),
the use of music can aid infants in the understanding of speech.
Here's how:
Infants can understand musical sound patterns prior to understanding words.
In essence, music allows an infant to practice “listening ahead”
and anticipating what will come next based on repetition of familiar songs and lullabies.
This skill is vital for making sense of the complex stream of sounds in speech.
(according to, "The Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development," by Gavin Bremner)
Speech is made up of strings of sound that constantly change.
And children learn to understand speech sounds as symbols
that make up a language code by age 1.
Repeated listening to vocalized sounds and syllables leads to this understanding
and is aided by early exposure to sound through music.
Additionally, music has strong rhythmic patterns as does language.
The timing of syllables helps define one speech sound from another and understand what is spoken.
And it's the ability to identify differences in speech sounds that helps babies learn to speak.
('Music improves baby brain responses to music and speech," Molly McElroy, Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences)
Other benefits of listening to music for the development of an infant's brain
are for regulation of emotion
and the development of communication skills.
(Hayne W. Reese's "Advances in Child Development and Behavior")
When we sing to our infant face-to-face,
they can associate specific oral movements and facial expressions with sound perception
and can gain other details of expression and regulation of emotion.
(according to "General Music Today" magazine)
Critical communication skills are learned
as they associate sounds with
emotions, events and objects that are part of the repeated lyrics.
Live singing is significantly more effective than recorded music
for keeping an infant's attention and
it promotes attending and imitation.
So, music is not simply entertaining.
It is not just for distraction through long nights of sleep-deprivation.
Music is not only for setting the right mood
nor for merely conjuring up past memories.
Get that CD player or satellite radio going in the car,
the Pandora station playing throughout the house,
sing those lullabies and nursery rhymes from your own childhood,
and ...
positively affect your infant's brain development!
