The science of language development has to do with the idea of neuroplasticity. When we are babies, neuroplasticity happens instantaneously while in older children and adults, it takes as much as 6 months for the brain to learn movement patterns or break bad habits. Many learning or language processing problems are preventable if our babies have constant exposure to language, talking, singing, and sing-songy types of speech. This idea has been taught to speech therapists as it is how we develop speech patterns. Language development in babies starts with singing and nursery rhymes according to the University of Cambridge. This type of phonetic information according to researchers is the foundation of speech elements. The sing-songy rhymic type of speech allows for faster language learning and integration, according to researchers who published their findings in the Journal of Nature Communications. Interestingly, many parents seem to have an almost innate sense of this and use this type of speech to their newborns and toddlers without thinking about it. Perhaps this is a part of us that is inborn for most of us to nurture our young. Check out the recent article from the University of Cambridge on human speech development below Why reading nursery rhymes and singing to babies may help them to learn language by University of Cambridge Parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible, say researchers. That's because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months. Phonetic information—the smallest sound elements of speech, typically represented by the alphabet—is considered by many linguists to be the foundation of language. Infants are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. But a new study suggests that phonetic information is learned too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic speech helps babies learn language by emphasizing the boundaries of individual words and is effective even in the first months of life. Read more