When parents listened and responded to a baby’s babbling, infants began to form complex sounds and started using language more quickly, according to a study published recently in the journal Infancy.
Language skills developed more slowly in babies whose parents didn’t make as much effort to understand their babbling, but instead sometimes directing their infants’ attention to something else.
“It’s not
[just that] responsiveness matters. It’s how a mother responds that matters,” study corresponding author Julie Gros-Louis, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, said in a university news release.
The study shows that “social stimulation shapes at a very early age what children attend to…they are learning how to learn,” study co-author Andrew King, a senior scientist in psychology at Indiana University, said in the news release.