Qué dicen los estudios de investigación sobre los beneficios de la música en el aprendizaje de los bebés

What the Research Says

Marie Baeta: To learn more about how music impacts infant development, we are so excited to welcome our special guest, Dr. Christina Zhao, who is a research assistant professor here at I-LABS and an expert on music learning in infants. Welcome, Christina, and please give us a little introduction to yourself and what you study.

Christina Zhao: Hi. Thank you, Marie. I'm super excited to be here today. Like you mentioned, my name is Christina Zhao, and I direct the Lab for Early Auditory Perception here within the I-LABS Research Institute. Our lab in general is very interested in how babies learn about all the complex sounds in their environment and what are the neural mechanisms that support this learning and development process?

Amelia Bachleda: I think, Christina, your research is just so fascinating. I'm so happy that you're here with us today. In particular, you've done some really cool work looking at what happens in the brain when babies are exposed to music. I'd love to know if you can share a little bit more about your work and what you found.

Christina: Yes, in our lab, we were particularly interested in those questions about the intersection between music and speech perception, because, as you mentioned, those two types of sounds are highly similar. They're dynamic, and they're interesting, and they've been in human history for a long time, and we can find them across world's cultures. Particularly, I will point out, is that both are highly rhythmic, as well.

We were curious to see how a fairly intensive music experience might influence infants' ability to detect these patterns in the both music and speech signal. That's because, for babies, the ability to track rhythmic patterns in speech sounds has been shown to be highly predictive of their ability or their learning to produce language later. In our lab, we conducted two what we call "randomized control studies," where we invited babies when they're 9 months old of age to the lab, and for a whole month of time, they come to the lab 12 times for 15 minutes each – these engaging and active play sessions. 

These experiences are very social, with their caregivers and other babies in the room. They also required body movements – all these characters that we know are helpful for babies to learn. However, one of the groups we randomly assigned to just come in for these very active free-play sessions. We will give the babies very typical infant toys, while the other half of the babies came in for music-play sessions, where they were moved with their caregivers to musical rhythms, such as their caregivers were bouncing them to musical beats and they're shaking rattles together, and their caregivers tapping their feet.

After this period, these 12 sessions, we measured the babies' brain activities, how their brains respond to changes in rhythmic patterns in both music and speech. We found that the babies who went through the music sessions, they not only – their brains were better at detecting changes in music rhythm. Their brains were also better and got better at detecting changes in speech rhythm, or language rhythm.

This was the first study in young babies that's showing that this experience to active music sessions helped or improved the ability for infants to make predictions of the rhythmic patterns in speech. We repeated this experiment again a few years later and looked at the deeper brain regions, and we found very consistent results, as well. Together, I think this research suggests that participation in these highly active, interactive music-play sessions may really improve infants' brain activities in terms of detecting sound patterns in speech and can help boost language development.

Amelia: I think that that is just so fascinating. It's so cool that these active music sessions that you're describing can help babies not only learn these musical rhythms, but potentially also learn that sort of rhythm of language and boost language learning. I'd love to know if music can be such a powerful learning support for language, what do we know about children's home environments, like are they getting access to a lot of musical experiences?

Christina: Yeah, we were exactly interested in that question, as well, and it was slightly trickier to answer that question. But we were fortunate to access a large database that has audio recordings taken in infants' home environment, when the babies were between 6 to 24 months of age.

This allowed us to really take a closer look at what was happening in infants' home environment, especially in terms of how much music sound they're hearing and how much speech sound they're hearing, and what kind of speech versus music – for example, was it directed towards the baby, or like you guys mentioned, infant-directed singing? What we found was actually quite surprising. We found, compared to speech, these infants were actually hearing very little music in their home environment.

Further, the majority of the music that they hear is coming from an electronic device, so like a speaker, and it wasn't really music that was intended for the baby. It's more like radios in the background or from the TV. There was really very little of this social, active music experiences that we devised in our lab settings. But, also, keep in mind this was a small sample from our corner of the North America. It's possible that it's different in different cultures, and we're really interested in looking at other cultures.

Amelia: I think that's so important to keep in mind – what is the sort of cultural situation of the different research that we're doing, for sure. It sounds like, at least here in North America, there's some room for improvement in providing infants and toddlers with high-quality musical experiences. We'd love to hear from you. Do you have recommendations for creating those quality musical experiences that you see as potentially being able to boost some of these learning for young children?

Christina: Yeah, that's such a great question. It's definitely something we're actively thinking about a lot – ways that we can help caregivers to incorporate music into their daily lives with babies. I would say just routines and daily activities where caregivers tend to interact with the babies or toddlers a lot, try to find strategies to incorporate music into those moments. Moving could be very helpful. Dancing to the music, singing a song, hitting a drum together -- I think they're all very good ways to engage with the little ones.

Amelia: That's wonderful. Well, Christina, Dr. Zhao, thank you so much for being here today. It has been really fascinating to hear about your work and how music helps children learn. I think that we all need to work a little bit harder to bring more musical experiences to young children. Thank you so much. 

For all of you viewing this webinar, as well – if you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Zhao’s research, we’ve added a link to her website in the chat for you to check it out. Thank you so, so much.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.