Talking to premature babies aids in their language development

Talking to babies who are born premature may help in their language development, a new study found.

Researchers involved in the study found that premature babies with parents who conversed with them while they were confined at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) had a tendency to score higher on developmental tests later on in their lives.

"This is certainly a remarkable, easy-to-implement and cost-effective intervention of informing moms of visiting their children in the intensive care unit," said Dr. Betty Vohr, senior author of the study from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

Dr. Vohr and her colleagues explain that while a baby is still in the womb, it is exposed to its mother's voice. Babies born prematurely, on the other hand, must stay in the NICU, listening to the sound and noises coming from machines. During their stay there, they are unable to hear people talking, especially directly to them. As a result, they are at a higher risk of developing language problems later on in life.

Throughout the study, the team of researchers followed 36 babies born eight week premature and placed in the NICU. They monitored the interaction between the babies and their parents as well as other adults and counted the number of words spoken to the newborns, including singing. They also took note of the instances when doctors or nurses talked withinin earshot of the babies but not necessarily directly toward to them.

They found that after taking the babies' birth weight into account, the amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 32 weeks accounted for 12 percent of differences in childrens' language scores. Overall, an increased amount of talking in the NICU was correlated with higher scores on thinking and language tests.