Infantilizing babies helps them learn language
Infantilizing babies helps them learn language

          
          
The coaching helped the parents to identify helpful habits in their own speech, like engaging in back-and-forth interactions with their babies. They were also given suggestions about what kinds of age-appropriate interactions they could have during activities like bathtime or meals.
First steps
The results were promising: parents in the coaching group showed more use of parentese over time compared to the control group and also engaged in more back-and-forth interactions with their babies. The babies themselves vocalized more, too—if you remove non-linguistic noises like coughing and count prelinguistic noises like babbling, the babies in the coaching group were chattier.
And at the end of the study, babies in the coaching group did better on language assessments than babies in the control group.
The researchers checked that factors like the parents’ level of education weren’t affecting the outcomes. They made sure that this was balanced across the two groups at the start of the experiment and had a look to see whether it was correlated with the children’s outcomes at the end. It wasn’t—babies from across the social class spectrum all seemed to get a boost when their parents received coaching.
But as promising as this research is, it’s just a start, and it does have some important weaknesses. For one thing, the control group didn’t have any intervention at all, while the coached group knew that researchers would be listening closely to their behavior to give them personal feedback. While it’s difficult to keep up an act for a whole weekend, it’s still possible this knowledge could have affected their behavior on the recordings.
And studying babies is messy, difficult, and time-consuming, with a really high drop-out rate among the participants. This, plus limited resources, usually means small samples, and this study is no exception. That doesn’t invalidate the results, but it does mean the data will be noisy, which could mean that the results are exaggerated. So more studies will be needed to confirm these results and understand them better.
Early language ability is linked to advantages later in life, but it’s a messy link that has a lot of different possible explanations. So one crucial question for future research to answer is whether these benefits persist later into the children’s lives—even after the coaching stops.
PNAS, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1921653117  (About DOIs).


          
                  