© Yukmin/Getty ImagesLearning a musical rhythm may help young babies learn language rhythms.
Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, a new study suggests.US researchers compared nine-month-old babies who played with toys and trucks to those who practiced banging out a rhythm during a series of play sessions.
They found the musical group showed more brain activity in regions involved with detecting patterns, an important skill when it comes to learning language.
Previous studies in children and adults have found a relationship between music training and processing sound, but it has been unclear about whether people involved in those studies developed superior sound perception as a result of music training, or they had natural auditory skills that predisposed them towards music in the first place.
"Our study is the first in young babies to suggest that experiencing a rhythmic pattern in music can also improve the ability to detect and make predictions about rhythmic patterns in speech," said lead author Christina Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS).
"This means that early, engaging musical experiences can have a more global effect on cognitive skills," Dr Zhao said.
The study, published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was small, enrolling just 39 babies and their parents, who took part in a dozen 15-minute play sessions over the course of a month.
Twenty of the babies listened to recorded children's music while they sat with their parents and helped pound out drum beats to music that included waltz rhythms and tunes like Take Me Out to the Ballgame, a baseball classic.
The other 19 babies also attended active play sessions that used toys and blocks, but without music.
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