I admit it. It’s been years since I had a little baby around routinely. That doesn’t mean I don’t recall how it was when those first few words and sounds emanated from my precious child’s mouth. (It was the same feelings with my grandson, of course.) And, there are tons of babies who come into “my” coffee shop, where I am the surrogate grandpa.

So, it wasn’t surprising to read about this new research study. Drs. Patricia Kuhl, Rey Ramirez, Alexis Bosseler, Jo-Fu Lotus Lin, and Toshiaki Imada (University of Washington, Seattle) published “Infants’ brain responses to speech suggest Analysis by Synthesis” published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

As babies are growing and hearing the sounds of speech about them, they are learning (internally, in their brains) how to form those sounds. In essence, they are rehearsing how they will communicate with the outside world. That’s why babies clearly understand what we tell them- because they are developing the vocabulary stores in their brains long before they ever speak a word.

The study examined 7 and 11 month olds. Unbelievably to me, these toddlers were placed- and stayed- in a magnetoencephalograph (MEG). (I know I would be twisting and turning!) This is kind of like an open fMRI device. The goal was to determine what portion(s) of the baby’s brain became excited when it heard the written word.

The MEG measures the magnetic (they are very tiny) fields that develop when the neurons of a brain become excited. Because these are pretty faint signals, the sensors it employs are cooled via liquid helium (they are superconducting sensors)- because even the earth’s magnetic fields can interfere with the readings of the device.

The researchers found that Broca’s region was one of the key excited portions of the brain. This is the region that we know is involved with speech comprehension. That region also affects our ability to speak in full sentences. (It is so named because Pierre Broca described a 51 y old man who had lesions in this brain region; the subject could understand the spoken word, but was barely able to speak in more than short phrases- and slowly, at that.)

Not only were the babies subjected to English words (their parents only spoke English), but Spanish vernacular was  employed in the study. The brains were excited in both language cases. And they found, as babies age, they are less likely to identify sounds with which they are not familiar (like listening to another language).

This means that learning to speak multiple languages is something that should be started very early. It also explains why many of my friends have difficulty speaking Hebrew and Russian words (let alone understanding them), since their brains were not introduced to certain sounds(the gutteral ‘ch’, for example) at an early age.

It also reinforces the claims that have been made about how vital it is to speak to our babies and read to them. Because by being confronted with the sounds, cadence, and phraseology of the vernacular, these children will be able to easily master the language skills necessary for life. Which, of course, sets their ability to succeed in school.

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