Baby Development – Rutgers University Finds Early Detection of Impairments in Language Development Means Speech Problems Could be corrected before a Child Learns to Talk

By Colleen Hurley, RD, Certified Kid’s Nutrition Specialist

Listening to the first sounds your baby makes is certainly an exciting moment.  It is hard to believe you may be able to understand if your child has any impairment in speech development at around that same time, yet new research has made an exciting discovery.  It may become possible to identify and prevent language problems even before baby starts to speak.

About 5 to 10% of children just starting school have some sort of language-learning impairments (LLI) that can lead to speaking, reading, and comprehension difficulties.  About 40 to 50% of families with a history of LLI are likely to have children with a similar problem, and many of these children develop dyslexia later in life.  During the first few months of life, babies’ brains develop an acoustic map of sounds that allows them to acquire a language.   Yet for some infants, this process seems to have gone amuck.

By understanding how infants’ brains recognize differences in sound, it may become possible to correct language difficulties even before a child begins speaking thus sparing them the difficulties associated with speech impediments.  This is the precise goal of Professor of Neuroscience April Benasich and her Infancy Studies Laboratory at Rutgers University in Newark.  The research team was the first to pinpoint that how efficiently a baby processes differences in rapidly occurring sounds can predict future language development.  It can be determined as early as 3 to 6 months of age whether or not a baby will struggle with language via methods developed by Benasich and her team. 

Utilizing dense array EEG/ERP recordings, researchers were able to analyze the gamma power of infant’s brains and allowed for a gentle measure of full brain activity.  The measurements were gathered placing a soft baby bonnet, similar to a hairnet with tiny sponges, on a baby’s head while having the baby listen to a series of rapid sound sequences.  Based on these methods, the preliminary research has revealed that babies who have difficulty processing rapid sounds appear to be using different parts of the brain.  Specifically, children who struggled with sounds had less activity in the left brain hemisphere when compared with the babies who did not struggle. It may be possible to guide the brains of babies at risk for developing language difficulties by isolating the differences in how the brain handles incoming auditory information.    

While these findings provide exciting news and hope for both babies and parents, the research team has more work to do and will continue the study.  Benasich states that they can predict with 90% accuracy the language capabilities of a baby by their response to sounds.  Now that the key factors have been indentified, the research will focus on how to correct the auditory processing impairments, develop training techniques, and pinpoint the moment during baby development when an infant’s brain is most pliable.   The research team will employ a magnetic resonance Imaging (MRI) protocol for sleeping babies.  While the baby sleeps, headphones are placed on their heads with a steady stream of lullabies, which will allow researchers to localize brain activity.