Listening to Music Helps Your Baby Talk Sooner

Auditory stimulation and language development are directly related. Hearing is a window that allows you to stimulate your baby’s speech development in multiple ways. Listening to music is one of them, helping and encouraging children to learn to identify sounds, sing songs and take part in activities.

There are many scientific studies that indicate that music stimulates children positively. One of these, carried out by the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin (USA), concluded specifically that music learning and language development operate through similar mechanisms.

Other research carried out at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA) shows that levels of cerebral activity increase in the areas related to speech in children who are exposed to musical patterns during the day. The researchers point out that exposure to music improves children’s ability to hear patterns in sound, an important skill for beginning to speak.

Listening to music benefits children

Music is beneficial for your child even before birth, and much more so after they are born. Music gets the child’s attention; for this reason it is used as a therapeutic tool.

One of the best resources to help your child speak is singing songs with him or her, according to an interview published online with the speech therapist and learning psychologist Claustre Cardona, a member of the Spanish Association of Logopedics, Phoniatrics, and Audiology.

This specialist explains that the exercise of singing with your child generates a rich interaction, and makes the language that he or she uses in that moment meaningful.

This means that the child begins to relate sounds to objects, especially if children’s songs are used. In fact, singing with babies is one of the activities that speech and language therapists use with children who have problems developing language.

Similarly, music is a highly effective and valuable tool in the treatment of disorders such as dyslexia and autism, helping to develop and improve the cognitive abilities of children at any stage of growth.

Singing with your baby is a tool that helps them to speak

Singing with your baby is particularly beneficial. We can teach them not just to memorize song lyrics, but also to pronounce words correctly and open their little mouth properly to speak. For this exercise to work, songs should be short, with sounds that the child can associate with things they know.

Songs are one of the most efficient tools to stimulate babies’ speech. In an interview published online, Benjy Montoya, the musician and creative director of Baby Radio, a station whose programs are designed specifically for little ones (and their parents), explains that “Music is a channel that connects us to the child’s emotions.”

So children’s songs – which are rich in rhyming phrases and repetition – allow babies to lay the foundations to understand and develop language. Babies that imitate musical sounds and repeat a sound again and again start to build a language intuitively.

Music is always a positive tool

In addition to helping them learn to talk, music stimulates children in multiple positive ways, contributing to their cerebral and mental development. Music stimulates children’s creativity and helps them to improve their memory. It also reduces any anxiety that the child may have.

Music contributes to babies’ neurological development. Their brains are activated in different ways when they hear sounds. All this neurological activity forms new connections that foster cognitive development, as well as motor and language skills.

Stimulating your baby with music is always a good idea. It relaxes them, entertains them and teaches them. It is no coincidence that mothers sing to their children intuitively to calm them and help them fall sleep. In addition to aiding the development of language in children, music also helps to relax them, as as a familiar source of pleasure and serenity.