If you want smarter babies, talk to them!

Findings of the study suggest that words have more influence on a baby’s brain development than simple sounds.

Lead researcher Susan Hespos, of Northwestern University in Illinois was quoted by The Daily Mail as saying, “For infants as young as three months of age, words exert a special influence that supports the ability to form a category.

"These findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories.”

46 infants studied
To reach this conclusion, researchers from the Northwestern University examined the effect of words versus sounds on the cognitive skills of 46 three- to four-month-old infants.

For the study, these infants were shown a series of few pictures such as a fish followed by words or beeps.

Half of the infants were assigned to the word group and the remaining half was put in the tone group.

The babies in the word group were told things like "Look at the toma!"--a made-up word for fish, as they looked at each picture, reported the Telegraph. And those in the tone group heard sounds matched with the pictures.

The researchers then showed a new picture of fish and a dinosaur to the babies side by side to test the categorization skills of the babies.

They also kept recording the time taken by the babies as they looked at each image.

Outcome of the study
On analysis, the researchers found that talking to babies did wonders in enhancing their brain power.

If the babies looked longer at a picture, this implied that they had formed a category in their mind from the previous exercise, explained the researchers.

Though babies in both the groups were shown similar pictures, only babies in the word group looked at a picture longer than their counterparts in the tone group.

Based on the results, the researchers concluded that words influence the thinking of the babies better than any kind of sounds much before they learn to speak.

Co-author Sandra Waxman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, was quoted by the Telegraph as saying, "We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorization.

"We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning."

The study will be published in the April edition of the journal Child Development.