Right Words Boost Infants’ Mental Development

One question new parents ask is what natural things can I do to stimulate the development of my baby’s brain and make them smarter?  There are number of very simple things that have good scientific evidence behind them.  For example,  new research from Northwestern University confirms that talking to your baby accelerates their cognitive development. Using the right words improves their ability to categorize objects.

It has long been held that talking to your baby is good for mental development but the Northwestern research found that this is so for the very young, only 2-4 months.  The researchers write:

“We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorization,” said Waxman, a co-author and professor of psychology. “We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning.”

Hearing object-correlated words influences  infants’ cognition even in the first few months of life! The key is to clearly use “real words” or ones that properly pick out objects.

It is not clear what the longer term brain-boosting advantages of this are but the ability to categorize is fundamental to how we think.

To get started you may want to check out the talking pointers from the Center for Early Literacy.     If you use this technique, or others to boost your baby’s brain development, please share your experience with other readers by leaving a comment.