Reading is Language Learning!

Hello, I’m Maheen! You might remember be from a BabyBrains blog post (What a High-Tech Mum-to-Be Can Do for Autism) on me and my work published a few years a go. How time flies! Now I am Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Babylab and I’m currently involved in developing new technology to measure brain activity in babies so we can understand how babies’ brains grow.

I completed my Ph.D. a little over 2 years ago and just one short month after passing my Ph.D. viva, I welcomed my very own baby girl into the world! I’ve always been fascinated by babies, but even more so after becoming a mum - how they learn and grow and how we, as parents, hold the potential to literally build their brains and shape their identity. After becoming a mum, I became very aware that social media is full with parenting strategies and advice that have no scientific evidence to back them up and that often, the science behind building happy, healthy little minds is locked behind complex scientific papers and long books that nobody has the time to read. This inspired me to empower parents with my knowledge of babies and their brains and share how they can use this knowledge to nurture their little ones. So, I set up an Instagram Blog called Happy Little Minds where I do just that!

We’ve been discussing all things reading over on Happy Little Minds and how important it is to read to your little one to build a bond with them and for their brain development. Before I dive into the science, I just want to emphasize that reading is a key language skill (other key skills include listening, speaking and writing) and so developing the ability to read is part of wider language development.

You might have been encouraged by a medical professional in some capacity – a paediatrician, a health visitor – to read to your baby. It does seem to be a strange suggestion to read to a baby who has barely just entered this world. While babies can’t understand much, their brains are growing rapidly. It has been estimated that in the first few years of life, there are as many as 1 million brain connections forming every single second! Specific brain connections form for a specific task and the more you perform that task, the more those connections are reinforced and the stronger they become. There are many different areas of the brain that are involved in reading and research actually shows regular reading with young children strengthens these specific brain connections - which in turn helps build life-long critical skills such as attention, memory, problem-solving, language, imaginative skills, communication and critical thinking. These key skills then help acquire further reading and language skills.

From birth (some research even suggests during pregnancy), babies start learning important skills that set the foundation for learning how to read. So, the process of learning how to read begins way before a child is even ready to read. There are many skills that need to be acquired to help a child read successfully. These include recognising letters and their sounds, enjoying looking at books, being able to follow written words and turning the pages of a book, being able to describe stories, recognising sounds in a word (e.g. rhyming, syllables) and… (I’ve saved one of the most important one for last) vocabulary! It is so important that your child starts acquiring a good vocabulary from a young age because they’re only going to be able to read when they know what a word means!

Let’s talk about vocabulary a little bit more. Vocabulary is something that is acquired both through reading and talking to your baby. In 2012, Professor Rowe and colleagues showed that as early as 18 months, a “language gap” starts to become apparent between toddlers who are regularly read to and verbally engaged with in comparison to those toddlers who aren’t. This gap widens over time and by the time the child is 3 years old, there is a staggering difference between the two groups of 30 million words per year with those toddlers being read to regularly having double the vocabulary, which was shown by work done by Hart and colleagues in 1995 and followed up by Talbot and colleagues in 2015. The important thing to note here is that vocabulary size actually predicts IQ, and has been shown to be linked to faster brain processing speed. Brain processing speed is how quickly your brain responds to information and it is a key skill in learning, academic performance and intellectual development - because it helps develop executive functions such as problem-solving, planning, memory and attention.

What exactly does the science say that should you be doing with your child? Read and speak to them!

Read age-appropriate books early and often. While reading, engage with your child by pointing to and naming pictures and objects and as they grow older asking questions such as “What’s that?” or “What’s happening here?”. Always follow your child’s lead and be prepared to read their favourite books to them again and again! Check out our previous post to learn more about the benefits of this type of joint media engagement.

When speaking to your child, tune into their interests. Pay attention to what your child is interested in and how they are communicating with you. Use this opportunity to start a conversation, this is relevant even for babies as babies are always trying to communicate with us! Use opportunities throughout the day to make conversation with your child and when you do, use a rich vocabulary and talk about complex ideas. Research shows that this drives understanding and thinking skills. For more information about how our use of speech shapes our infant’s language development click here!

But most importantly – have fun! The act of sitting down with your child and reading, with no distractions and providing them your full attention, helps strength the parent-child bond and creates memories like no other!

For more interesting science-based topics on early development check out My Instagram Blog: Happy Little Minds.

Growing Up in the Digital Age

For this month’s #freshfromthelab we are going to be chatting about Professor Rachel Barr’s (Georgetown University) work on how young children learn from media, and what caregivers can do to promote learning.

Media is everywhere in a growing child’s life – child friendly tablet and smartphone games, child-directed TV programmes and even picture books are all considered as types of media. But how do young children learn from these resources, and how do they apply what they have learnt to the real world around them? Understanding this topic is important now more than ever given the ongoing COVID pandemic. A recent USA survey found over half of caregivers said that since the start of the pandemic their child’s screen time had increased by 50% - likely due to a combination of drastic changes to childcare arrangements and home-schooling all whilst parents try to jungle other commitments such as work and household management.

But should we be worried about this increase in screen time and its impact on the next generation’s learning? Short answer: no, providing they have an adult’s helping hand to guide them through the process.

Learning from media during early childhood is limited. Media often doesn’t provide all of the same information that the real world does. A TV programme would likely only provide 2D visual and auditory information. TV also lacks contingent social interaction - the person on the TV cannot respond to your child so, for example, learning how to respond correctly to social cues is limited.

Young children also have difficulties with their own memory flexibility. Young children find it difficult to transfer the knowledge learnt in one form to another – a topic we’ve already covered in ‘Movement: Practice Makes Perfect’ where kids learning to walk would make the same mistakes they had done when learning to crawl. The same goes for transferring knowledge from one media form (e.g. TV) to the real world – something that when not done well we call transfer deficit.

In an ingenious experiment, Professor Barr and her colleagues tested this transfer deficit with a group of 2-3-year-old participants. First, the toddlers were taught a simple puzzle where they had to rearrange shapes on either a magnetic board (real life) or on a tablet (media). In the next stage of the experiment, the young children had to re-create the puzzle that had previously been shown, either with the same or opposite device (magnet board or tablet). The children who learnt and did the puzzle using the same device did the best. Those children who had to do the puzzle with the opposite device had a much larger transfer deficit and preformed relatively poorly on the puzzle task.

But fear not! Like I said earlier, all these little ones needed was a helping hand from their caregiver. When Professor Barr introduced parents to the learning stage of the puzzle task, there was a huge improvement in the ability to transfer what had been learnt from one device with their caregiver to the opposite device. Looking a little more closely at the interactions that were happening between caregiver and child during the learning stage of the task, Professor Barr and colleagues concluded that the caregiver’s joint media engagement was likely supporting the child’s learning process. As adults, we readily do this joint media engagement when showing a picture book to a child. We provide structuring to the learning process by drawing attention to what is important in the book (e.g., pointing at objects or saying something along the lines of “Oh, look at the pretty flower”). We elaborate on the information that is there (e.g., “Look at the cat! He looks like our cat!”). We also provide reassurance (e.g., cuddling) and reward (e.g. “well done!”). All these things are essential for your little one when they are learning. But Professor Barr explains that caregivers often don’t participate in these forms of joint media engagement for media involving touchscreens as they feel all the information the child requires is already there. But as Professor Barr demonstrated it’s not, and children learn best with this media form when guided by a caregiver in a supportive manner. Check out this video for a summary of Professor Barr’s findings when the same age-tailored study is conducted with 15-month old toddler – they also needed parent support in the learning process!

Professor Barr also pointed out that this joint media engagement doesn’t have to be 100% of the time! But every little helps. Why not check out Screen Sense – a FREE science-backed resource pack full of tips and tricks for helping you and your little ones make the most of screen-based media.

So, next time your little one is engrossed in their media of choice maybe try to get involved – point things out, ask questions, and elaborate on what information is provided there. If nothing else, it’s a great bonding exercise and a welcome excuse to disengage from reality for a short while! Check out our app for other activities you and your little one can do together.

Movement: Practice Makes Perfect

In this month's #Freshfromthelab, we will tell you about Professor Adolf work on movement acquisition in infants.

Babies move. They wriggle, they squirm, they kick. And the fact they do these things from as early as prenatally, points towards the critical role movement plays in development. Professor Adolf from New York University’s department of psychology tells us that movement is the foundation of wider learning. It allows infants to explore their everyday environment and opens new opportunities for perception, cognition, and social interaction.

From the day they are born, babies are growing at extraordinary speed. Within the first year of life, babies grow on average 10 inches and triple their birthweight. Moving with this rapidly changing body requires behavioural flexibility. Acquiring this flexibility also puts them in good stead to deal with a number of challenges related to efficient movement, such as selecting and modifying ongoing appropriate actions to suit a varying environment. Just think, when your toddler is traversing the living-room they might first crawl over to the sofa to cruise its length, then take a few steps before landing on their bum to crawl the remaining distance to the toy they intended to get. This range of movement requires on-the-fly changes to adapt to what is available to help them on their way in their ever-expanding environment.

Much like anything else, acquiring flexibility requires lots of practice and experience. With an ingenious study design, Professor Adolf demonstrated the effect experience has on movement in action. When placing 12-month old novice walkers on top of a platform with a steep 90cm drop, 50% of infants will literally walk off the edge (before mum/dad swiftly catches them). When the infant is 18-months they are experienced. They know they are too small to safely walk down the very steep drop. So, they get on their bum and shuffle down. This is flexibility - they knew their body wasn’t up for the drop while walking so they changed their movement to accommodate.

Interestingly, Professor Adolf demonstrated that this flexibility isn’t transferred to other skills. If an infant learns from experience something is too steep to crawl down, they will likely still try to walk down it if they are novice walkers. A new skills means new information needs to be gathered. More practice needs to be done.

Babies have a “try, try and try again” attitude when it comes to learning to move. Falling is all part of the practice – and babies are the prefect fallers. They aren’t very high off the ground in the first place, and they have squishy bodies padded with baby fat that cushions the blow. 91% of infant falls are uneventful, and on average infants recover from falls within 2 seconds. Infants aren’t put off learning to walk because they fell over, they just get back up and keep trying. This mentality is something we could (re)learn from our little ones and implement in our challenging adult lives – a notion touched upon by Silvia in her post this month.

Check out our Babybrains app for some movement activities to do with your little one as they are developing.