If you regularly confab with your toddler about all manner of things, you’re actually doing their brain a lot of favours.
That’s according to a new study which found two-and-a-half year olds who heard more speech on a daily basis had more myelin in the language-related areas of their brains.
Lead researcher Professor John Spencer, from the University of East Anglia, said: “Myelin is made up of protein and fatty substances and forms an insulating layer around nerves in the brain. It makes brain signals more efficient.
“Imagine you have a hosepipe with lots of holes in it. Myelin is like wrapping the hosepipe with duct tape – it insulates neural fibres, bringing more of the ‘signal’ from one brain area to the next.”
It’s thought all of this contributes to more sophisticated language processing in toddlers.
Children’s brains develop very rapidly in the first two years of life, with brain volume at about 80% that of an adult brain by the age of two.
The research team wanted to know more about how myelin is involved with early brain development, and particularly whether talking to young children boosts production of it.
They studied data from 163 babies and toddlers, who wore small recording devices for up to 16 hours per day across three days.
These devices captured 6,208 hours of language data in total – including speech from adults, conversational turns and words spoken by the children themselves.
To measure brain structure, the researchers waited until the infants fell asleep and then carefully placed them in a MRI scanner to measure brain myelin.
Prof Spencer said: “What we found is that the toddlers who heard more speech in their everyday environment, also had more myelin, which is likely to support more sophisticated language processing.
“In other words: talking to your kids is very important in early development as it helps to shape the brain.”
The study is one of the first to show that language input is associated with brain structure early in development.
Previous research has showed a similar association in four-to-six-year-olds, but the latest findings push this association much earlier in development.
“Indeed, we even found associations between language input and brain structure in six-month-old infants,” said Prof Spencer.
His key takeaway for parents is to “talk to your baby, your toddler, your child. Not only are they listening, but your language input is literally shaping their brains”.