It is never too early to start talking to your baby

Dr Noora Mubarak Al Meraikhi underlines the importance and positive impact of baby talk

As a parent, you play a key role in helping your child acquire language skills that are important for learning and building relationships, and this begins prenatally. Satish Kumar / The National

From the very first time you hold your newborn baby in your arms, an awareness floods over you that life will never be the same again. Another human being is now dependent upon you for survival. More than anything else, you want to be the best parent possible. So, how do you communicate with this new little person?

Adults and older children use verbal communication to indicate their needs, likes and dislikes, to request information, to socialise, as well as to establish and maintain relationships. While a newborn doesn’t use words, he or she is definitely able to communicate. Babies can look into their mother’s and father’s face in a way that tells them they want to hear their voices. By crying, a baby is conveying that he or she is hungry, requires a nappy change or has other needs to be met. And a baby’s babbling represents its first efforts at speech. While most children don’t start putting words together until after their first year, parents are encouraged to “talk” to their babies not only during infancy, but prenatally.

Researchers have demonstrated that a baby is able to respond to sounds as early as 10 weeks before birth, and can recognise the mother’s voice and sound patterns of the language she is speaking. This demonstrates the importance of “talking” to one’s baby even before they are born. A newborn takes comfort listening to familiar voices and sounds that he or she heard constantly during pregnancy: such as the mother’s everyday speech, as well her singing, or reciting the Quran, poems or nursery rhymes. Communicating verbally with one’s baby lays the foundation for a strong attachment between parent and child. This attachment underpins learning and development – it helps children thrive.

A new study by Rutgers University in the US reports that babies can be trained to recognise language-like sounds, which can accelerate the development of brain mapping that is critical to language acquisition. Researchers have found that babies at the age of four months can learn to pay attention to complex non-language sounds, and scans of their brains at seven months show they were faster and more accurate at detecting other sounds and more responsive to language than babies who had not been exposed to the sound patterns.

The ability to distinguish language sounds at an early age also explains why young children are able to learn a second language more easily than adults. Studies show that babies hearing two languages prenatally and following birth are at an advantage. If they are consistently exposed to the same two languages in the early years, they develop the ability to discriminate sounds within both languages, learn the rules of communication, and speak each language with the accent of a native speaker.

While the child may mix the languages in his or her own speech initially, this will typically be sorted out before three years of age. Helping the child build his or her self-confidence throughout the process of dual-language acquisition is extremely important.

As a parent, you play a key role in helping your child acquire language skills that are important for learning and building relationships, and this begins prenatally. Through repeated face-to-face conversations and positive interactions, you have a lasting effect not only on your child’s language, but also on their cognitive, motor and social-emotional development. Speaking to your child is essential to optimal development.

So yes, you can and should “talk” to your babies – even before you meet them face-to-face.

Dr Noora Mubarak Al Meraikhi is a paediatric specialist at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City and a fellow of the Shamsa bint Mohammed Al Nahyan early childhood development programme with the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation