Music and Singing
Music in itself has many benefits, like activating widespread brain networks, boosting our mood by increasing dopamine, reducing stress by lowering cortisol, aiding physical health through pain management and exercising, and increasing social connection, making it an essential tool for our mental, emotional, and physical state. Same goes for singing. Both in combination make the perfect ensemble. It doesn't matter how old you are, the effects and benefits are the same for anyone at any stage of life. But do they also cause the same benefits and effects in an unborn child in a womb? How about an increase in language acquisition? Absolutely! When said child listens to music and songs with lyrics, they are learning the sounds, patterns, and rhythms of a language, and when exposed to it frequently and repeatedly, it creates everlasting effects, which will carry on into their infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Music activates the language portion of our brains, making it easier to retain language, even more so than reading, talking, listening, etc. Vocabulary, phonology, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax are some of the areas of language that are boosted through music.
As usual, mom plays the biggest part in her baby's language acquisition through music and signing because of the fact that mom and baby share the same physical space and environment. Therefore, babies can hear the sounds and melodies of a song much better when mom is singing herself or playing music directly in her ears because it creates an echo effect that travels within, easier for such baby to receive. Applying wide headphones onto the pregnant belly is also applicable, but sound will need to travel through some more layers to get to the baby, making it a bit more muffled. The same effect occurs for people on the outside who sing and play music or an instrument. Nevertheless, the baby can still perceive the sounds and melodies.
Any song and style of music is an educational experience for a baby, but children's songs can be considered the best as they focus on simpler vocabulary and sentence structure, on constant repetition, on rhyming, on more attractive musical sounds - more kiddish.
My BabyLingua loves music, singing and babies! You will be coached on the many ways to use music to help activate language awareness in your baby.
"Prenatal exposure to music is associated with fine-tuned coding of the fundamental frequency of human speech, which may facilitate processing and early language acquisition."
~ Sonia Arenillas-Alcón, News-Medical.net, 2023.
"Prenatal sound stimulation including music and speech can form stimulus-specific memory traces during fetal period and effect neonatal neural system."
