Singing calms babies, toddlers better and longer than talking: study

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A new study published in the journal Infancy shows how music can play a better role in calming down a child than merely speaking to him or her, Medical News Today reports. Researchers from the University of Montreal found that infants remained calm twice as long when they were listening to a song, rather than when they listened to a parent's speech, even if it was an adult baby talking.

While adults are affected by music physically and emotionally, infants on the other hand respond to it differently. According to study co-author Professor Isabelle Peretz, of the Center for Research on Brain, Music and Language at the University of Montreal in Canada, "Infants do not synchronize their external behaviour with the music, either because they lack the requisite physical or mental ability."

According to EurekAlert, Peretz said, "Many studies have looked at how singing and speech affect infants' attention, but we wanted to know how they affect a baby's emotional self-control. Emotional self-control is obviously not developed in infants, and we believe singing helps babies and children develop this capacity."

Researchers analyzed 30 healthy infants with ages 6 to 9 months. The first experiment invovled keeping the babies calm by speaking to them through baby talk or adult speech, playing recorded baby talk or adult speech, or playing Turkish music that they have never heard before. The reason behind choosing Turkish songs is that so the babies will have a reaction that was not influenced by sensitivity to their parents' voices. Parents of the infant participants sat behind them to avoid influencing their child's reactions.

The results were impressive. According to first study author Mariève Corbeil, "When listening to the Turkish song, babies remained calm for an average duration of approximately nine minutes. For speech, it was roughly only half as long, regardless of whether it was baby-talk or not."

A second experiment was conducted with another set of babies, this time with recordings of their mothers singing in French, a language they were familiar with. Researchers found similar results, that the infants remained calmer for a longer period of time. However, despite listening to a familiar language, they did not keep calm as long as the other group of infants who listened to Turkish songs did. Researchers theorize that rhythm instead of words is what's appealing to the children.

CTV News reports that Corbeil said, "These findings speak to the intrinsic importance of music, and of nursery rhymes in particular, which appeal to our desire for simplicity, and repetition."

Researchers also believe that singing has emotion-regulatory properties, and most Western mothers miss out on this because they do not sing very often, especially mothers who are challenged by adverse socio-economic or emotional circumstances.

According to Peretz, "Although infant distress signals typically prompt parental comforting interventions, they induce frustration and anger in some at-risk parents, leading to insensitive responding and, in the worst cases, to infant neglect or abuse. At-risk parents within the purview of social service agencies could be encouraged to play vocal music to infants and, better still, to sing to them."