There is no basis to this strange feeling that your infant is smiling at you, and smiling because he knows you're his mother. He might look as wise as the ages when he gazes into your eyes- but face up to the facts. Science turns it out that babies know a lot more than our best minds previously suspected. If they smile, it may well be because they recognize your voice. When they babble, they are probably not speaking nonsense, but practising speech.
This is not just hopeful theorising. Thanks to new technology that allows scientists to study living brains, the bank of evidence is growing fast. A study has been made in order to challenge the traditional understanding of early language development, which holds that babies must develop motor skills before they can beg
in to connect sounds to meanings.
This theory takes a different view. It considers that when a child babbles, it's not just trying to get control over its facial muscles. Babies are 'literally trying to say the sounds' they hear, and trying to make sense of 'the patterns of sounds in the world around them'. Scientists look at the way babies moved their mouths when babbling and contrasted this with the movements when they smiled or made non-babbling noises. They studied English, French and Spanish children to be sure they weren't studying mouth movements specific to one language.
The results showed uniformity in all cases. When the babies smiled, they opened the left sides of their mouths, using more muscles on the left side of the face. When they were making 'non-babbling', noises they used the middle of the mouth, and when they babbled they pulled down on the right side of the mouth, using more right-side muscles.
The mouth is being carved out depending on the function of what's coming out. And this function could only occur if different parts of the brain are participating in the control of different functions. The right-side of the face, used for smiling, is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, where the emotional control centres are located. But babbling is a left-side mouth function and controlled by the right side of the brain- the centre for speech. This tells that language processing starts far earlier than we ever thought and without much language experience. As young as five months, the brain is already discriminating between a purely physical response and an oral one.
To conclude with, we should try to get much information in this field, because our babies need our attention and to be understood by the ones around.
Baby Talk written by Cristina Nuta for FamousWhy.com
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