Singing to babies is a common practice in most cultures. Lullabies are known to have a soothing effect on the child. However, it may do much more than that. Engaging newborns with music can be a technique for boosting social development in children as young as two months old. A study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PANS) has found that musical sensitivity can help in the social development of children. The research, which involved 112 infants, tracked infants’ moment-by-moment eye-looking. Researchers found that this behaviour became synchronised to the social cues provided by the caregivers when music was involved.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Marcus Autism Center, and Emory University School of Medicine enlisted 112 two or six-month-old infants in their research. They found that infants synchronise their eye-looking to the singing directed towards them. Additionally, they also become entrained in the caregivers’ social cues at sub-second timescales.
The study found that two-month-old babies were twice as likely to look into the singers’ eyes based on the musical beat compared to what would usually happen by chance.
Six-month-olds were more than four times as likely to look at the singers’ eyes synchronised to the musical beats. While two-month-old kids are only beginning to engage with others in an interactive manner for the first time, six-month-olds are usually highly experienced in face-to-face musical games and are at a stage where they are developing increasingly sophisticated rhythmic and communicative behaviours.
Miriam Lense, PhD, assistant professor of Otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC said, “Here we show that when caregivers sing to their infants, they are intuitively structuring their behaviour to support the caregiver-infant social bond and infant social learning.
Not all kinds of music will give the same results, though. This entrained social interaction relies heavily on a predictable singing rhythm. When the researchers experimentally manipulated the singing such that it did not have a predictable rhythm anymore, entrainment was disrupted. Infants did not successfully synchronise their eye-looking to the caregivers’ social cues.
Reyna Gordon, PhD, associate professor of Otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC, highlighted that the study reveals that making music is a critical aspect of early socio-emotional development.
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