Children’s language skills are fundamental to their ability to benefit from the opportunities offered by education. Recent brain imaging studies with babies are showing us some of the mechanisms that the brain uses to create a language system. Rhythm and rhyme are fundamentally important.
HOW DO BABIES LEARN LANGUAGE?
The new brain research uses the fact that when we speak, we are creating sound waves, moving energy through the air. The brain picks up these energy changes, aligning its own intrinsic rhythms to these energy waves, which are heard as different rhythm patterns in speech.
We can think of the brain waves ‘surfing’ the sound waves. Brain waves occur naturally at a range of different speeds. ‘Speech-brain alignment’ is the neural tracking of speech rhythms at different speeds by automatic matching with the correct brain waves. Speech-brain alignment is an automatic aspect of how we listen.
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