Singing calms babies longer than talking

In a new study from the University of Montreal, infants remained calm twice as long when listening to a song, which they didn’t even know, as they did when listening to speech.

“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,” explained Professor Isabelle Peretz of the university’s Centre for Research on Brain, Music and Language.

“Emotional self-control is obviously not developed in infants, and we believe singing helps babies and children develop this capacity.” The study, recently published in Infancy, involved 30 healthy infants aged between six and nine months.

Humans are in fact naturally enraptured by music. In adults and older children, this “entrainment” is displayed by behaviours such as foot-tapping, head-nodding, or drumming. “Infants do not synchronise their external behaviour with the music, either because they lack the requisite physical or mental ability,” Peretz explained. “Part of our study was to determine if they have the mental ability. Our finding shows that the babies did get carried away by the music, which suggests they do have the mental capacity to be “entrained”.”

The researchers took a variety of measures to ensure the children’s reaction to the music was not influenced by other factors, such as sensitivity to their mother’s voice. Firstly, both the speech (“baby talk” and adult-directed) and the music presented to infants were produced in Turkish, so that the song and language were unfamiliar.

“The performer sang Turkish play songs, not Western ones. This is an important point as studies have shown that the songs we sing to infants have a specific range of tones and rhythms,” explained first author Marieve Corbeil, also of the University of Montreal. “Every parent knows it’s not much use singing Rihanna to their baby!” Secondly, the babies were not exposed to any other stimuli.

“Although their parents were in the room, they sat behind the babies, so their facial expressions could not influence the child’s,” Corbeil added. “Infants were also exposed to recordings, rather than a live performance, to ensure comparable performances for all children and no social interactions between performer and child.”

The researchers played the recordings until the infants displayed the “cry face” — lowered brows, lip corners pulled to the side, mouth opening and raised cheeks. This is infants’ most common facial expression of distress. “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,” Corbeil said. Baby talk kept them calm for just over four minutes, on average; for adult-directed speech, it was just under four minutes. “The lack of significant distinction between the two types of speech was surprising,” she added.