Infants understand language via rhythm and tone rather than individual sounds

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Abstract:

"Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however previous cortical tracking studies were unable to demonstrate the presence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically invariant phonetic encoding emerging over the first year of life, providing neurophysiological evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By contrast, we found no credible evidence for age-related increases in cortical tracking of the acoustic spectrogram."

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43490-x

Maybe more complex songs and songs with big words can make the baby more articulate. Maybe rap will have other effects.

I wonder what's the effect of playing baby songs and exposing the baby to dumbed down versions of everything.

This seems to be why people naturally default to sing-song when speaking to babies.