Why is it good to read poetry to toddlers?
Last reviewed: 07.06.2024
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The brain of small children, starting from the newborn period, responds in priority not so much to individual words and phrases, but to the speech rhythm, which is then compared with certain sounds.
How to teach your baby to speak? How to explain to him/her that certain sounds are letters that can be combined into words, denoting some object, action, etc.? Moreover, the child needs to understand that words can be combined, resulting in the formation of a phrase, a sentence. We are not talking about grammar yet, because we are talking about small children.
In learning to speak, the infant primarily listens to adults speak and matches this with what he can reproduce himself.
Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Dublin have conducted some speech experiments with toddlers. During the project, fifty babies watched a video clip of a caregiver singing funny children's songs. The children were repeatedly watched this video throughout their first year of life. During this period, the researchers checked the brain activity of the participants, using the method of electroencephalography. After processing the data, it was possible to determine how children's brains "responded" to a particular speech or sound.
It was found that children perceived isolated sounds not immediately, but gradually: perception began with consonant sounds. The perception of rhythmic information was much more active: toddlers quickly reacted to changes in the intonation of pronunciation, to emphasized speech accents and accents.
Learning the rhythm of speech was recorded in children as early as 2 months of age, which surprised scientists. According to the researchers, the reaction to rhythmicity allows babies to "build" a kind of basis in their representation, on which the subsequent phonetic information received is then layered.
Developing a sense of rhythm allows the child to understand at what point a word ends and begins, and there are far fewer problems in mastering speech.
Rhythmicity is present in all speech styles, but it is most clearly reproduced in verse and song. Researchers believe that starting from the newborn period, babies should be read nursery rhymes, verse stories, songs and lullabies. In this way, the infant's brain can be more quickly tuned to understand speech structure.
The child's ability to speak will accelerate with the understanding of the rhythm of speech. This approach can well be used in various new pedagogical and speech therapy methods. Active use of poems and songs will help babies to cope with difficulties in speech reproduction - this applies, among other things, to children who have certain disorders of the nervous system.
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