Featuring Bloedel Affiliate Christina Zhao, PhD.
By Lauren Kirschmant:
Speech and music are the dominant elements of an infant’s auditory environment. While past research has shown that speech plays a critical role in children’s language development, less is known about the music that infants hear.
A new University of Washington study, published May 21 in Developmental Science, is the first to compare the amount of music and speech that children hear in infancy. Results showed that infants hear more spoken language than music, with the gap widening as the babies get older.
“We wanted to get a snapshot of what’s happening in infants’ home environments,” said corresponding author Christina Zhao, a UW research assistant professor of speech and hearing sciences. “Quite a few studies have looked at how many words babies hear at home, and they’ve shown that it’s the amount of infant-directed speech that’s important in language development. We realized we don’t know anything about what type of music babies are hearing and how it compares to speech.”
Read more in UW News.