On Baby Signing

This is an excellent article written on the topic of using sign language to enhance language and literacy skills. The bottom line is that signing can be fun and enjoyable and it doesn't hurt language development. But, it's not clear that it helps either. So, if you want to learn to use sign with your baby go for it. At the same time, don't feel that you MUST do this, young children can learn to talk without it.
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Communication

As you already know, newborn babies communicate mainly through cries. The first cry you probably heard was your baby’s birth cry, which consists of a couple of gasps and a wail lasting about a second. Other cries will tell you things like “I’m hungry,” “I’m in pain,” or “I’m upset.” The hunger cry is typically a pattern of loud crying, silence, whistling inhalation, and rest, which may include a sucking response. Pain is expressed by a loud, shrill cry. This pattern includes a long cry, a long breath-holding silence, and whimpering. Often your baby will manifest tension in his face, some frowns, or clenched fists. An upset or angry cry expends a large volume of air, resulting in an exasperated sound. These are general patterns of cries— your baby will have his own variation. It won’t take you long to tell the difference between your baby’s cries. This is a first area of connection for you and your baby, just like eye contact in the visual system and reflexes in the motor system.

Cognition

Vision and hearing are relatively well developed in the newborn (compared to other areas). Your newborn can see things best about 7½ inches from his or her face. Babies are sensitive to color and bright light, closing their eyes if the light is too bright. They can recognize an object if it reappears within 2½ seconds—meaning that their memory lasts for a very short time, but is still present. During the newborn period, babies are alert—looking around their environment—about 5% of the time they are awake. And they sleep about 70% of the time—though not all at once! This means that newborns are alert a total of about 22 minutes a day. Sometimes newborns get “stuck” on interesting objects, because they don’t yet have the movement or motor control over their body to shift attention from one object to another.

Newborns seem to have preferences about what to attend to. They like objects that move, things that have sharp contours, and dark/light contrasts. When looking at your face, your baby will tend to look at your hairline, eyes, or mouth—areas that present high-contrast visual stimuli.

Motor Skills

Newborns, soon after birth, typically fall into a long sleep that lasts about 14-18 hours. This deep sleep helps your baby to conserve energy. It also helps him to stabilize functions such as blood circulation, breathing, and digestion. At birth and during the first few days, newborn babies move randomly. These twitching movements and jerks are involuntary and referred to as reflexes. Reflexes are the first reliable movement responses your baby makes to his environment, and they occur automatically. Some of your baby’s reflexes—mass activity reflexes—manifest themselves by their whole body responding to stimulation of one part of the body. Examples might be changes in temperature, light, and sound. Other reflexes—specific activity reflexes—are seen within an isolated part of your baby’s body. Some researchers believe that babies’ reflexes let them respond to their environment and learn about how to organize their bodies. Some reflexes, such as gagging and coughing, protect your baby. The phasic bite reflex is seen when your baby’s gums are touched and rubbed—here, your baby will respond by opening his mouth from a biting position. The rooting reflex is seen when your baby’s cheek is stroked—he will turn his lips, tongue, and jaw toward the touch. The rhythmic suck-swallow pattern is seen when a finger or nipple is inserted into your baby’s mouth. These reflexes are often seen during eating, and are crucial for nourishment.

Social Skills

Newborns tend to prefer the sound of the human voice. So your singing, cooing, and talking to them soothes them. They’ve heard mommy’s and daddy’s voices in the last 3 months of pregnancy because their auditory system was already functioning, There are some reports of newborns recognizing their parents’ voices at birth. Newborn babies also smile reflexively. This smile typically occurs when the cheek or lips are touched or in light sleep. You’ll know it’s a reflex because the area around the eyes doesn’t crinkle— a significant difference between social and reflexive smiles. Nonetheless, this reflexive smiling helps to set the stage for face to face connection, attention, and continued learning. These early abilities probably help newborns to “tune in” to their parents and set the stage for parent-child attachment.

Hearing

Babies are born with fluid in their middle ear (behind the eardrum), so their hearing is not as sensitive as it will be in about 2 weeks when this fluid is absorbed. Nevertheless, they can tell the difference between loud and soft sounds and between short and long sound duration. The auditory feedback loop is already present and used by your newborn baby. The auditory feedback loop is the relationship between the ability of a baby to use sounds that she hears in order to control or monitor sounds that she produces. Experiments testing the auditory feedback loop examine a baby’s change in heart rate or breathing rate in response to presentation of the same or a different sound. Amazingly, within the first few days after birth, babies can tell the difference between sounds. Distinguishing specific sounds in words, however, comes later. But newborns are able to perceive a great deal right from birth.

Really?

Really? I'll say it again really? People thought that Baby Einstein was going to make their babies smart? Okay, if it didn't work you can go get a refund.

I'm so glad I never was given a set of those things, I know many people who did. My worry was that I couldn't then in good consciousness go and give the things to the Good Will or somthing, it would be perpetuating the notion that sticking babies in front of the television would make them smarter. And, yes it IS television.

But, it's educational!! No, it isn't. What made people go for this drivel in the first place? Well, it turns out that very young children can learn to distinguish different sounds. They can even distinguish sounds in languages that are not in their native language. But, over time, they lose the ability to make the distinctions in the language that they don't hear everyday.

We also know that babies who are exposed to lots of language on average learn more words. But, videos and television-- while they may use language, words, and concepts that babies can learn are not INTERACTIVE. Duh! Here's more on that issue.

Now, I'm not saying that sometimes it isn't convenient to park your baby in front of something like this so that you can take a shower. I'm just saying that you can't count on videos to teach your baby language. Language has give and take, it's responsive-- those are things that only other people in your baby's life can do.

Vision

During the first week of life, your baby can focus on your face, making it the first image in his visual memory. He will gaze at your face and look into your eyes. Eye contact is an important form of communication that will aid your baby’s growth and development. It is one of the first ways he can reliably make contact with you, and it provides a way for you and your baby to begin making emotional contact, known as bonding. Because of sensitivity to bright lights in the first few days after birth, your baby will most likely close his eyes during the day, even when awake. He or she will prefer dim lighting because the pigmentation, or color, of his iris, the part of the eye that regulates the amount of light that enters, is not fully developed. Your baby will blink at bright lights, such as camera flashes, but may also gaze momentarily at certain bright lights or bright objects.

Commentary - We can all play a part in strengthening families

Commentary - We can all play a part in strengthening families

Brain Development

Development of cognition (knowledge about the world), language, and motor skills is highly correlated with brain development. We know that brain development begins during pregnancy. During the 16th week of gestation, cells in your baby’s brain began dividing. Growth occurs very rapidly in the brain stem, which controls basic functions, such as breathing, and in the primary motor (movement) and somatic sensory (hearing, vision, etc.) areas. At birth, your baby’s brain weights about 335 grams—about 25% of your adult brain weight of 1320 grams. After birth and during the first year, the brain grows fast, to about 70% of its adult size by 12 months. Development during this period is important, and is evident in the various areas that we will be covering.

Talking To Babies Helps With Cognitive Development | AHN

Talking To Babies Helps With Cognitive Development AHN

Talking to Children

I read this article today on a new book, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. The emphasis is on what it is parents can do to nurture and support learning. It's worth a read.

My work with older (preschool children) on mediated learning shows that it's not only about exposing children to language that helps them learn it, it's helping them understand what to pay attention to and to learn to regulate their own attention-- essentially learning how to learn.

In some ways, this isn't all that different from mediated learning, but it seems to do a nice job in providing information based on the vast amount of scientific literature that is available.

How should parents help children learn to learn. One aspect is attention. Many homes around the world are information rich. There's a lot of information-- visual, auditory, sensory-- that babies and young children (and we as adults) need to learn to organize and grapple with. So, an important skill becomes learning how to attend to one thing at a time within the information stream. Parents are instrumental in helping children to pay attention to what's important (and to ignore what's not important). One way parents can do this is through repetition (and variation). Babies seem to like routine-- they find comfort in it. At the same time the novel is fun. By keeping the same basic routine, but varying one thing (or two) at a time, babies can learn to pay attention and look for the novel.

That's it for now. More on this and other topics later.

Smart Dogs, Smarter Babies

"Your dog may be smarter than your toddler" screams the headline in CNN. Can it be true? What kinds of intelligence do dogs display? And what does it have to do with child language development?

Well, there are two claims made in the article. One finding is that dogs understand about 180 words, signs, signals and gestures. How does this compare to young children? Toddlers between 18 and 24 months on average can produce about 180 different words (note that these are averages, children are very idiosyncratic at this age and so their vocabulary size can vary a lot). We would expect children at this age to use at least 50 different words (so, you can see how much variation there is). But, children may UNDERSTAND many MANY more words than they use. By this same age (18 months), they should understand about 300 or more words. By age two they understand even more. So, it looks like here toddlers know MORE words than dogs.

The other thing I found interesting in this article is that dogs seem to be able to recognize number of items. The way this experiment was done is very clever. This is because dogs can't tell you how many they see (neither can very young children). But, they can tell you if the number of treats they expected in their bowl is not what they got. How? Well, the person doing the experiment dropped treats into a bowl for the dog one at a time. But, they either took out or added treats while the dog was not looking. When the number of items matched the number of items the dog saw put into the bowl they went straight to eating it. When the number expected did not match the actual count, the dog paused for a moment. This pause time difference was a way that experimenters were able to infer that the dogs had noticed the change in number.

Similar experiments have been done with babies. In one experiment, researchers showed babies arrays of dots. Babies as young as 6 MONTHS could tell the difference between 2 and 3 dots. As in the dog experiment, babies couldn't just tell the examiner how many they saw, but they experimenters could tell by how long they babies looked at the arrays that they could tell there was a difference. At this age however they did not notice the difference between 4 and 6 dots-- they looked at those arrays the same amount of time. Again this is an age much younger than 2 or so.

So, all in all, dogs do have some surprising abilities. But babies language and math abilities are better. Enjoy!

The Power of Music

We know from experience that music can influence how we feel. We can play music to set a mood for dinner. Children seem to respond to music as well, some music is soothing and may help babies sleep while other music seems exciting to them. Can babies tell the difference between happy and sad music? How early can they distinguish these differences?

A research study published in the Infant Behavior and Development focused on these questions in babies ages 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9 months of age. How is it possible to even tell if babies can make these distinctions?! The researcher in the study used habituation. The basic idea is this: When you hear something new, you usually notice it. But, if it's not new or the same thing is presented several times you get bored and no longer pay attention to it. Same thing with babies. They initially become alert and might look around to see what the source is when they hear a new sound. After the same thing is presented several times they no longer care-- they become habituated to the sound. There are many variations to this scheme depending on the question and on the baby's age.

In this experiment babies of different ages were habituated to sad or happy music. The researchers did 3 experiments to understand what the babies were and weren't paying attention to and to understand whether they could really tell the music apart and under what circumstances.

The results indicated that first babies at all ages habituated to the music. But, only babies over 3 months were able to distinguish between the happy and sad music but in different ways depending on age. When the 5 month olds and 7 month olds heard sad music during habituation they paid more attention to the happy music. But, when they heard happy music during habituation they didn't seem to pay more attention to the sad music. The oldest group (9-months old) were able to notice the change in both directions (from happy to sad; sad to happy).

What does all this mean? The relationship between music and language is not well known, but this is a good step toward this understanding. Music, like language and speech, can be used to convey meaning. Babies seem to be able to pick up on differences related to tone, intonation, pitch, and tempo (all which differentiate happy and sad music). This doesn't mean they know what sad or happy is, only that they can recognize the differences in the music. But, even very young children are starting to at least be able to tell the differences associated with affect. Being able to recognize these differences may be important in learning how to learn emotion and mood which provides information beyond what is said and helps in development of effective communication.

So you may be wondering what vision, hearing, and crawling have to do with language? Turns out that these are the ways your baby gets information about the world and about you that gives her something to talk about when she gets ready to use words. If you have language, you have to use it to talk about things you know about. So what your baby sees and hears in her first year matters a LOT for making language development happen. What she does when she learns to roll over and crawl, walk and move things around with her hands helps her to figure out what the world is like and how things work. Watching and listening to other people talk gives her the information she needs to start learning sounds and words to use herself. So, even though vision, and hearing and crawling seem far away from language, they are really completely necessary to get it started. The experiences that you give your baby in her first year that use her senses and her growing ability to move and explore are her "work tools" for learning to talk!

TV Decreases Children's Language Use

I think in a lot of ways that it makes sense. If young children are watching TV then they're not interacting with adults. Interaction is the way children learn how to communicate, what words to use, and the back and forth of turn-taking. Turn-taking provides a critical foundation for language learning.

A recent study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine was reported in the Huntsville Natural Parenting Examiner today. I went and hunted down the original study. I was interested in what the practical effects were and what they did exactly.

The researchers used a system called LENA. This system uses a digital processor to record and count the language (in words) children produce and what they hear throughout the day. For research this is a powerful way to track children's linguistic exposure and to document their development. The researchers used LENA for this purpose. They examined how many words children heard spoken by adults, how much television they heard, and how many words they used.

They found that for every hour children listened to television (or that television was on in the presence of the child), they heard between 500-1000 fewer words. They were about 1/4 of a standard deviation lower in their vocalizations and turn taking for every hour of television they heard. Children who were exposed to television used correspondingly fewer turns for every hour of hearing TV.

What does this mean? From a practical perspective, more TV means less interaction. Less interaction seems to lead to less language learning. Of course there are times when parents simply need children to pay attention to something else. I remember those early months when even taking a shower uninterrupted seemed like a big accomplishment. We do need strategies for getting through the day and television could be one of those tools. But, especially for young children, it should not be the only one or even the primary one. I still agree that limiting TV exposure for children-- especially those under two (but even older kids) will lead to more productive communication.

The Baby Chronicles

For the last couple of years (okay for the last few years), Babs and I have been working on a newsletter about children's first year of life. We have a free sample of the newsletter that focuses on the first week of development. Future installments will be 8 pages long and available for a small fee. We'll focus on language, social interaction, brain and cognitive development, motor skills, vision and hearing month by month. We'll let you know as we start to post them to the site. Read the sample and let us know what you think.

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Walking and talking go hand and mouth together

June 15
Did you ever wonder if babies’ crawling and their babbling had anything to do with each other? Crawling is one arm and foot forward and then the other one, pretty nice organized rhythm. Babbling is opening and closing the mouth and turning on the voice box, another pretty nice organized rhythm. Both of them come from brain planning. Since they start at about the same time and both need for the baby to do movements that are organized, it seems logical that they might be linked up in babies’ brain. Turns out that babies who can crawl make more advanced kinds of sounds than babies who don’t crawl yet. And, they like to link up with people around them to use those babbling sounds. So, it looks like moving and talking go together. So watch that baby of yours when she is moving and see what you think about whether you get more babbling.

What's in a name?

Today the list of most popular baby names was released. The top girl's name was Emma and the top boy's name for 2008 was Jacob. I was really tickled because my mother's name is Emma. Her mother and my cousin are named Emma. No one in the next generation is named Emma, but maybe the one after-- we'll see. Naming a new baby is an important ritual. Sometimes parents name their children after a parent, or after an ancestor. Other parents want to deliberately not repeat a name in the family. Still others look for the unusual.

In naming Powerful Babble, we thought about what the content of this blog would be and what we wanted it to convey. Babies babble. But, how do they get from the sounds they make as newborns: goos, coos, burbs, cries to babbling? What about from babbling to words and then word combinations? In this blog we will be discussing news about babies and current research that helps us understand how development unfolds. I believe that the process of organization of babies motor skills, hearing, cognition, and social skills go into babbling and then shape these babbles into words. This is powerful stuff!

What about your baby? Why did you name him or her and why?