The semantic pedants among us were sung to a lot.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

According to scientists from the University of Cambridge, there’s more to the earworm than infuriating parents across the English-speaking world – they have found that singsong speech is crucial to helping babies learn language.

The researchers said that the findings, which have been published in the journal Nature Communications, challenge the view that phonetic information – typically represented by the alphabet – is the key to language learning.

Prof Usha Goswami, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who is the study’s author, said: “Our research shows that the individual sounds of speech are not processed reliably until around seven months, even though most infants can recognise familiar words like ‘bottle’ by this point.

“Parents should talk and sing to their babies as much as possible or use infant-directed speech like nursery rhymes because it will make a difference to language outcome.”

To understand whether that was the case, the researchers recorded the brain activity of 50 infants at four, seven and 11 months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes.

She said there was a long history of trying to explain these in terms of phonetic problems but the evidence does not add up, and individual differences in children’s language learning skills may originate with rhythm.

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