Parents who talk to infants more boost their brain development: Research
A team led by a neurodevelopment researcher from the University of Texas at Dallas has uncovered some of the most compelling evidence to date showing parents who talk to their newborns more boost their brain development.
Using MRI and audio recordings, the researchers demonstrated how caregiver speech is related to newborn brain development in ways that support long-term language development. The work was published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience’s print issue in June and online on April 11. Dr Meghan Swanson, an assistant professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is the report’s principal author.
White matter in the brain facilitates communication between various gray matter regions, where information processing takes place in the brain.
“This timing of home recordings was chosen because it straddles the emergence of words,” Swanson said. “We wanted to capture both this prelinguistic, babbling time frame, as well as a point after or near the emergence of talking.” It’s long been known that an infant’s home environment—especially the quality of caregiver speech —directly influences language acquisition, but the mechanisms behind this are unclear. Swanson’s team imaged several areas of the brain’s white matter, focusing on developing neurological pathways.
“The arcuate fasciculus is the fiber tract that everyone in neurobiology courses learns is essential to producing and understanding language, but that finding is based on adult brains,” Swanson said. “In these children, we looked at other potentially meaningful fiber tracts as well, including the uncinate fasciculus, which has been linked to learning and memory.” The researchers used the images to measure fractional anisotropy (FA). This metric for the freedom or restriction of water movement in the brain is used as a proxy for the progress of white matter development.
The study’s results align with other recent research showing that slower maturation of white matter confers a cognitive advantage.
“As a brain matures, it becomes less plastic—networks get set in place. But from a neurobiological standpoint, infancy is unlike any other time. An infant brain seems to rely on a prolonged period of plasticity to learn certain skills,” Swanson said. “The results show a clear, striking negative association between FA and child vocalization.”
