Suppanen, E. , Huotilainen, M. & Ylinen, S.
University of Helsinki
Previous research suggests that music and rhythm can enhance learning, memory and aesthetic appreciation. Children may use rhythm also in the segmentation of continuous speech. We sought to investigate whether the rhythmic structure of nursery rhymes facilitates learning from auditory input in newborn infants.
The effect of rhythm was tested with recordings of auditory event-related potentials (ERP). Newborn infants (N = 22, mean age 2 days) were presented with three types of auditory input modified from a traditional nursery rhyme: two verses were spoken as a poem, two verses were sung to a melody and two excerpts included ordinary speech (prose).
In the learning phase, the infants were presented with excerpts from the poem, song and prose. The order of input types was counterbalanced across participants. In the following testing phase, one of the words in each verse was randomly changed to be inconsistent with the learned content. Indicating the learning of original input, the brain responses to changed words differed significantly from those to original words for the poem only. This suggests it may be that rhythmic structure of poetry may facilitate infants' learning from auditory input and may thus be beneficial to language development.