During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world implemented restrictive measures — such as stay-at-home orders and school closures — to mitigate the spread of the respiratory illness. It’s been well-documented that this disruption of daily routines and social activities on the mental health of adolescents.

Adolescence, the period of transition between childhood and adulthood, is marked by dramatic changes in emotional, behavioral and social development. It’s also a time when a sense of self-identity, self-confidence and self-control are developed. The pandemic reduced social interaction for teenagers and led to documented reports of anxiety, depression and stress, especially for girls.

New research from the 91̽��, published Sept. 9 in the , found the pandemic also resulted in unusually accelerated brain maturation in adolescents. This maturation was more pronounced in girls. When measured in terms of the number of years of accelerated brain development, the mean acceleration was 4.2 years in females and 1.4 years in males.

“We think of the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis,” said , senior author and co-director of the 91̽�� (I-LABS), “but we know that it produced other profound changes in our lives, especially for teenagers.”

Brain maturation is measured by the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of tissue in the brain. The cerebral cortex naturally thins with age, even in teens. Chronic stress and adversity are known to accelerate cortical thinning, which is associated with an increased risk for the development of neuropsychiatric and behavioral disorders. Many of these disorders, such as anxiety and depression, often emerge during adolescence — with females at a higher risk.

The 91̽��research began in 2018 as a longitudinal study of 160 teens between 9 and 17 years, with the original objective of evaluating changes in brain structure during typical adolescence. The cohort was slated to return in 2020, but the pandemic delayed the repeat tests until 2021. By then, the original intent to study typical teen development was no longer viable.

“Once the pandemic was underway, we started to think about which brain measures would allow us to estimate what the pandemic lockdown had done to the brain,” said , lead author and research scientist at I-LABS. “What did it mean for our teens to be at home rather than in their social groups — not at school, not playing sports, not hanging out?”

Using the original 2018 data, researchers created a model of expected cortical thinning during the teen years. They then re-examined the brains of the adolescents, over 80% of whom returned for the second set of measurements. The teens’ brains showed a general effect of accelerated thinning across adolescence, but this was much more pronounced in females. The cortical thinning effects in females were seen all over the brain, in all lobes and both hemispheres. In males, the effects were only seen in the visual cortex.

The greater impact on female brains as opposed to male brains could be due to differences in the importance of social interaction for girls versus boys, Kuhl said. She added that female teenagers often rely more heavily on the relationships with other girls, prioritizing the ability to gather, talk to each other and share feelings. Boys tend to gather for physical activity.

“Teenagers really are walking a tightrope, trying to get their lives together,” Kuhl said. “They’re under tremendous pressure. Then a global pandemic strikes and their normal channels of stress release are gone. Those release outlets aren’t there anymore, but the social criticisms and pressures remain because of social media. What the pandemic really seems to have done is to isolate girls. All teenagers got isolated, but girls suffered more. It affected their brains much more dramatically.”

The cerebral cortex is unlikely to get thicker again, Kuhl said, but the potential for recovery might take the form of slower thinning over time, after the return of normal social interactions and outlets. Further research will be needed to see if this is the case.

“It is possible that there might be some recovery,” Kuhl said. “On the other hand, it’s also possible to imagine that brain maturation will remain accelerated in these teens.”

In older populations, measures of cognitive brain function, such as processing speed and the ability to complete typical tasks, correlate with how much the cerebral cortex has thinned. That kind of data is not yet available for teenagers, Kuhl said, but it could be where future research is headed.

“The pandemic provided a test case for the fragility of teenagers’ brains,” Kuhl said. “Our research introduces a new set of questions about what it means to speed up the aging process in the brain. All the best research raises profound new questions, and I think that’s what we’ve done here.”

, a 91̽��research associate professor of psychology and data science fellow at the eScience Institute, is a co-author. The research was funded by a grant from the Bezos Family Foundation.

For more information, contact Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu.

A parent interacting with a baby is a heart-warming and universal scene. The parent speaks in a high-pitched voice — known as “parentese” — as they respond positively to the baby’s babbling and gestures, commonly with eye contact and smiles.

These connections don’t just make for a touching sight. New research from the 91̽��’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows they’re important for infant language growth, too.

In a study , researchers used a safe and noninvasive brain-imaging technique called magnetoencephalography, or MEG, to monitor infant brain activity during social and nonsocial interactions with the same adult. They found that when the adult talked and played socially with a 5-month-old baby, the baby’s brain activity particularly increased in regions responsible for attention — and the level of this type of activity predicted enhanced language development at later ages. This ‘social’ scenario was compared with a ‘nonsocial’ scenario in which the adult turned away from the baby to talk to another person. This interaction showed lower activity levels in the same brain areas.

“This is the first study to directly compare infant brain responses to adult-infant social interaction versus nonsocial interaction, and then follow up with the children until they reached the age of 2.5 to see how the early brain activation relates to the child’s future language abilities,” said lead author , research scientist at I-LABS.

The MEG brain-imaging technology allowed the baby to move and interact naturally with the adult, which enabled researchers to track the firing of neurons from multiple areas in the baby’s brain as the adult talked to, played with and smiled at the baby. They then monitored the infant’s brain activity a second time as the adult turned away and paid attention to someone else.

These actions naturally occur every day between adults and babies, and the study showed they have different measurable effects on a baby’s brain. Researchers found that increased neural activity in response to the social interaction at 5 months predicted enhanced language development at five later ages: 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 months. The researchers tracked infants’ language development using a well-documented and validated survey that asks parents about words and sentences their infants say at home.

“The connection between early brain reactions and later language is consistent with scientists’ fascination with the early age period and opens up many new questions that we, and others, will be exploring,” said co-author , I-LABS co-director and a 91̽��professor of psychology.

Researchers chose 5-month-old babies for the study because that age is just before the “sensitive period” for speech-language learning, which begins at about 6 months. Once this period begins, it’s especially important for infants to observe adults because attention enhances learning.

Using parentese with infants represents an intuitive desire to connect, said , senior author and co-director of I-LABS.

“There’s an implicit understanding that language is about connection,” Kuhl said. “It’s about a communicative pathway between you and the other. This starts in infancy with the desire to make that communicative connection.”

The study’s results are particularly important for parents and early educators to understand, Kuhl said.

“We knew from previous work that social interaction is essential at 9-months of age for foreign-language learning, but the current study shows that social interaction plays a role much earlier,” Kuhl said. “The study shows that parents’ natural use of parentese, coupled with smiles, touch and their warm back-and-forth responses to the baby’s actions, have a real-world, measurable impact on the baby’s brain. We theorize that this parent behavior, which we call ‘the social ensemble,’ captures and holds infants’ attention and motivates them to learn at a critical time in development.”

Additional co-authors were , , , , and , all of I-LABS.  The study was funded by The Bezos Family Foundation, the Overdeck Foundation and grants from the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact Kuhl at pkkhul@uw.edu.

When the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools nationwide, students of all ages — from high-schoolers in Advanced Placement classes to preschoolers getting the hang of the ABCs — shifted to remote learning on a screen.

And while learning to read in an online setting may seem a tall order, a new study by the 91̽��’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences finds that children can develop key reading skills in a virtual classroom with other students. Researchers say their “Reading Camp” program demonstrates not only the effectiveness of the approach, but also the potential to reach larger numbers of students remotely, by necessity or by choice.

“Children are ready to learn to read at the age of 5. But the pandemic robbed children of the opportunity for in-person reading instruction. What we’ve shown here is that an online Reading Camp designed to promote learning socially works phenomenally well. An online camp can be used all over the world by children anywhere, and that is truly exciting,” said faculty author , co-director of I-LABS and a 91̽��professor of speech and hearing sciences.

The , published online March 31 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, details a two-week reading program, which teachers provided remotely to 83 5-year-olds beginning in fall 2020.

Learning to read involves a series of steps, from recognizing distinguished sounds in a language (phonological awareness), to identifying the names of individual letters and how they sound (letter-sound knowledge), to decoding words and their meanings.

The study finds that the participants demonstrated learning of specific reading skills, such as phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge, when compared to a control group of children who did not receive the instruction.

I-LABS researchers, including study co-author (now at Stanford University), in 2019 offered a two-week reading summer camp to teach early literacy skills to pre-kindergarteners and measure brain activity before and after instruction. With the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020, researchers decided to adapt the in-person Reading Camp into an online version over Zoom.

Ahead of the remote camp, researchers mailed parents a kit of materials, which included headphones, worksheets and books, as well as Play-Doh, toys and other fun items for use in the lessons. Children used colored plastic eggs from the kit, for example, to “vote” for the right answer in their virtual classroom, rather than raising a hand.

The Reading Camp grouped children into six-person classrooms, each with two instructors trained in the specific skills lessons. Sessions lasted three hours a day, with several breaks, short lessons broken up by activities, and ending with a story time. The classrooms were often broken into even smaller, three-student breakout rooms, each with a teacher to focus the lessons and games.

“This shows that we can actually teach kids online if we’re using the correct methodology, keeping them engaged, and they’re interacting socially with their peers and teachers,” said , a research scientist at I-LABS and the study’s first author. “Combining all of this made it successful.”

Children in both the Reading Camp and control groups took several standardized and non-standardized tests to assess knowledge of letters, sounds and words. The results showed that the Reading Camp participants improved in all of the reading skills measured, and their phonological awareness and knowledge of lowercase letters and sounds, in particular, more than the children in the control group.

“Frankly, I had my doubts about whether 5-year-olds could learn to read online without a live tutor. But when I saw these 5-year-olds on Zoom laughing and encouraging each other to listen and hold up the right color egg, I was amazed. Their social connections to each other were obvious, and their learning was incredible. They called each other by name and seemed very eager to see each other on the screen,” Kuhl said.

Researchers plan to hold additional online reading camps, and to add brain scans prior to and after the camps to evaluate how learning to read affects brain development.

The study was funded by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Petunia Charitable Fund.

Additional co-authors were Suzanne Ender, Liesbeth Gijbels, Hailley Loop, Julia Mizrahi and Bo Woo, all of I-LABS.

For more information, contact Weiss at ylweiss@uw.edu, Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or Yeatman at jyeatman@stanford.edu.

Used in virtually all of the world’s languages, parentese is a speaking style that draws baby’s attention. Parents adopt its simple grammar and words, plus its exaggerated sounds, almost without thinking about it.

But if parents knew the way they speak could help baby learn, would they alter their speech?

A new study from the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS, at the 91̽�� suggests they would, to baby’s benefit. Researchers examined how parent coaching about the value of parentese affected adults’ use of it with their own infants, and demonstrated that increases in the use of parentese enhanced children’s later language skills.

The , published online Feb. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that parents who participated in individual coaching sessions used parentese more often than control-group parents who were not coached, and that coaching produced more parent-child “conversational turns” and increased the child’s language skills months later.

“We’ve known for some time that the use of parentese is associated with improved language outcomes,” said , I-LABS co-director and professor of speech and hearing sciences at the UW. “But we didn’t know why. We believe parentese makes language learning easier because of its simpler linguistic structure and exaggerated sounds. But this new work suggests a more fundamental reason.

“We now think parentese works because it’s a social hook for the baby brain — its high pitch and slower tempo are socially engaging and invite the baby to respond.”

Parentese is not what is often called “baby talk,” which is generally a mash-up of silly sounds and nonsense words. Instead, it is fully grammatical speech that involves real words, elongated vowels and exaggerated tones of voice. Spoken directly to the child, it sounds happy and engaged, and helps infants tune in socially to their parents and respond, even if only through babbling.

In a 2018 study, I-LABS researchers tracked use of parentese among adults and their 6-month-old infants, and found that babies whose parents participated in parentese coaching sessions babbled more and produced more words by age 14 months than infants whose parents were not directed in the technique.

The new study focuses on the long-term outcomes of parent coaching and how it led to changes in the parents’ language, in parent-child conversation, and eventually, in the child’s speech at 18 months.

“We had no idea that parents would respond so positively to information about how their own speech to the child affects the child’s language development. Parent coaching gave parents a measurement tool, almost like a Fitbit for parentese, and it worked,” said lead author , a 91̽��assistant professor of linguistics.

To assess child language output, all families in the study were given a lightweight recorder, which the child wore in a specially designed vest during four separate weekends at ages 6, 10, 14 and 18 months. The recorded both parent and infant speech over the entirety of two consecutive days, so that researchers could measure parents’ use of parentese, parent-child conversational turns, as well as infant language production — either babbling or actual words. Parent coaching sessions occurred at 6, 10 and 14 months.

For the 48 families randomly assigned to receive coaching, the sessions provided guidance and feedback on specific communication strategies, such as using parentese, speaking directly to the child and engaging the child in back-and-forth exchanges known as conversational turns. In reviewing recordings with parents, researchers played back recordings of parents’ language behaviors and measured them against research-based targets for child language development. Parents were encouraged to include language as part of daily routines and were given language-interaction tips in the form of cards with “brain building” tips from Vroom, a program of the Bezos Family Foundation.

All parents in the study already used parentese at the beginning of the project, but their use varied greatly, the researchers said. Those in the coaching group learned more about the cognitive and social benefits of parentese, when and how to use it to promote interaction with their child, and the positive effects that parentese could have on their child’s language development.

The results show that parent coaching resulted in an increased use of parentese and infant vocalizations that continued to grow after the end of the parent coaching sessions. Between 14- and 18-months, coached families showed a drastic jump in conversational turn-taking and child vocalizations. Children of coached parents produced real words — such as “banana” or “milk” — at almost twice the frequency of children whose parents were in the control group. Parent surveys estimated that the children’s 18-month vocabulary averaged around 100 words among children of coached families, compared to 60 words among children in the control group.

“We know that language skills in infancy predict subsequent stages in language development, so enhancements in language behaviors in infancy could therefore have cascading effects on speech development over time,” said Ferjan Ramírez.

Kuhl added, “Language evolved to facilitate the social communication skills that are essential for survival of the species. In this study, we observe firsthand how parents’ language and social engagement can promote baby’s initial responsive coos, which become words, and then sentences — educating infants in the art of human communication.”

The study was funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation and 91̽��I-LABS Ready Mind Project. , outreach and education director at I-LABS, was a co-author.

For more information, contact Ferjan Ramírez at naja@uw.edu or 206-543-4503, or Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or 206-685-1921.

Knowledge of multiple languages has long been shown to have lifelong benefits, from enhancing communication skills to boosting professional opportunities to staving off the cognitive effects of aging.

When researchers at the 91̽�� found that even babies whose parents are monolingual could rapidly learn a second language in a small classroom environment, a new challenge was born:

How could they expand their program?

One answer, the 91̽��team found, was to create software that would train language tutors online — allowing the researchers’ curriculum and method to be replicated anywhere in the world.

A new study by UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS, part of researchers’ ongoing work with infant education centers in Spain, not only found that bilingual teaching led to sustained English-language comprehension and vocabulary-building, but also that the method could be scaled up to serve more, and more economically diverse, children.

“We knew our research-based method worked to boost second language skills rapidly in infants, without negatively affecting their first language, but the question was, how can we train people worldwide to use it? Here, we show that online training works,” said , the lead author of both studies who is a new assistant professor of linguistics at the 91̽��and a former I-LABS research scientist.

The , published online Jan. 22 in Mind, Brain, and Education, extends previous research that examined whether and how infants can learn a second language in the context of an early education center, if they don’t get that exposure at home. That 2017 study involved 280 children at four infant education centers in Madrid, Spain, and showed the effects of an interactive, play-based English-language program, compared to the standard bilingual program already available in Madrid schools.

The new study used the same curriculum but trained tutors differently, using an online program called SparkLing developed by I-LABS researchers. By testing a remote form of teacher training and providing lessons to larger groups of children, researchers explored how to spread the benefits of bilingual education across a wider population.

The I-LABS bilingual curriculum emphasizes social interaction, play and quality and quantity of language from teachers. The approach uses parentese, a slow, clear speaking style that often involves exaggerated vowels and intonation. Researchers created the SparkLing software in order to reach language tutors wherever they live. In the 2017 study, for example, tutors were trained at I-LABS. But to bring this method to entire schools or communities online training was essential, researchers said.

In the new study, over 800 children in 13 infant education centers participated. The team grouped children, from ages 9 months to 33 months, into age-specific classes and focused on schools with much lower socioeconomic populations than were tested in the previous study.

“One of the most exciting aspects of the study is that we did our work in some of the very poorest neighborhood schools in Madrid, and we’re thrilled to show that these children learn as impressively as those from more affluent neighborhoods. All children, given the right stimulation at the right time, can learn,” said , co-director of I-LABS and co-author of the paper.

Children’s Spanish and English skills were assessed at the beginning of the study, midway through the school year and at the end of the year. Older children used a touch-screen based word-comprehension assessment tool in Spanish and English, matching words and pictures, and answering questions. All of the children also wore special vests outfitted with lightweight recorders to record any English words uttered by the infants during the 45-minute, daily language sessions.

At the midpoint of the school year, children who received the I-LABS method scored significantly higher in comprehension and word production than their control group peers: an average of nearly 50 words per child, per hour, compared to an average of about 14 words per child, per hour, in the control group.

About half of the children continued their lessons for an additional 18 weeks. At the end of that period, assessments showed that children who continued the lessons also continued to rapidly advance their second-language comprehension and production skills, while the group that returned to the original classroom maintained the English skills acquired after the first 18 weeks.

“Parents worldwide have a common problem: They want their children to speak a second language, but many don’t speak that language themselves. We know that zero to 5 is a critical age, a window of opportunity for second language learning, and our newest study shows that when teachers in early education classrooms are trained online to use our method and curriculum, children’s learning seems almost magical,” said Kuhl, who is also a 91̽��professor or speech and hearing sciences.

The researchers now hope to begin using this method in the United States, where about are raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken.

The study was supported by the Madrid Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports; the 91̽��I-LABS Ready Mind Project; and the Bezos Family Foundation.

For more information, contact Ferjan Ramírez at naja@uw.edu or 206-543-4503, or Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or 206-685-1921.

When it comes to helping infants learn to talk, it’s not just how much parents say, but how they say it.

Speaking directly to the baby with a style of speech known as “parentese” — talking slowly and clearly, often with exaggerated vowels and intonation — appears to improve infant language development. A new study from the 91̽��’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows that parents who learn how and why to speak parentese can have a direct impact on their children’s vocabulary.

“We know from over 30 years of research in the lab that infants prefer parentese over standard speech, and that infants who are exposed to more parentese at home have larger vocabularies as toddlers,” said , professor of speech and hearing sciences and co-director of I-LABS. “We wanted to explore whether parents benefit from “coaching” by adapting their own speaking style and whether this would affect their child’s language outcomes.”

In the new , published online in Developmental Science, researchers used audio recordings of participating families’ typical weekends. Parents were randomly assigned to the “coaching” or “control” groups: Those in the control group were recorded, while those in the coaching group not only were recorded, but also participated in individual parent coaching sessions during which they received language-interaction tips in the form of cards with “brain building” tips from Vroom, and discussed their recordings with the coach. Babies whose parents received coaching during the study were significantly more verbal by 14 months of age.

Parentese is not what many people think of as “baby talk.” The latter is typically a mash-up of nonsense words and silly sounds (think: “cutesie-wootsie”), whereas parentese is fully grammatical speech that involves real words, elongated vowels and exaggerated tones of voice – it sounds happy and conveys total engagement with the child. Spoken directly to the child — and used across many languages — parentese resonates with infants, researchers say, and helps babies tune in socially to their parents, and motivates them to talk back, even if that just means babbling.

“Most parents know that the amount of language their child hears is important. What we shared with them through coaching is that how they talk to their baby may matter even more,” said , a research scientist at I-LABS and lead author of the study. “We explained to them the research behind parentese, and made sure they were aware of the connection between their language input, and their speaking style in particular, and their baby’s language outcomes.”

The research team decided to examine the role of coaching, Ferjan Ramírez said, because parents vary widely in their understanding of how babies learn to talk, and of their own role in language development. So the study pool deliberately included people of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

The study involved 77 parents and their infants, who were 6 months old at the beginning of the project. All families were given a lightweight recorder, to be worn by the baby in a specially designed vest, and asked to record the entirety of two weekend days when babies were 6, 10 and 14 months old. The can record everything the baby hears and says, so it allowed researchers to track both parent and infant speech. Individual coaching sessions occurred at six and 10 months. Researchers evaluated the recordings of families in both groups.

The coaching sessions for parents in the intervention group provided lessons and feedback on specific communication strategies: parentese, speaking directly to their child, and incorporating language in one-on-one interactions. During the sessions, the coach played recordings of specific speech styles and compared the parents’ own recordings to research-based targets for child language development. Parents then were provided tips on how to use these communication strategies through daily routines, such as mealtime or bath time.

According to the study, between six and 14 months, parents in the coached group increased the amount of speech directed to their child and increased parentese by 15 percent. Parents in the control group showed less growth in their use of both strategies, averaging about 7 percent.

To measure child language skills, the team classified infant recordings as “babbling” — use of vowels, consonant-vowel syllables and strings of word-like sounds —  or as words if they were clearly recognizable English words. For the purposes of this study, all participating parents spoke English as their primary language.

The researchers found that babies of coached families babbled, on average, in 43 percent of the analyzed recordings, while control babies babbled in 30 percent of the recordings. In addition, at 14 months, intervention babies produced significantly more words than control babies, as measured by the recordings as well as parent reports.

A key takeaway is that any parent can incorporate these communication strategies — using parentese, interacting with the child — in their usual activities.

“Language learning can be ignited during daily routines, such as diaper changes, grocery shopping or sharing a meal,” Ferjan Ramírez said. “Everyday moments and daily interactions really matter, and parents can create more such moments and be more intentional about them.”

The study showed that parent speech is malleable, across a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, she added.

“Parents are a child’s first and most important teachers, and we are happy to show they can have an immediate positive effect on the growth of their child’s language. Early language skills are important predictors of a child’s learning to read and of their success in school, and parents can directly affect their child’s outcomes in this way.”

The study was funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation and the I-LABS Ready Mind Project. Other authors of the study were , outreach and education director at I-LABS, and graduate student .

###

For more information, contact Ferjan Ramírez at naja@uw.edu or 206-221-6415.

For years, scientists and parents alike have touted the benefits of introducing babies to two languages: Bilingual experience has been shown to improve cognitive abilities, especially problem-solving.

And for infants raised in households where two languages are spoken, that bilingual learning happens almost effortlessly. But how can babies in monolingual households develop such skills?

“As researchers studying early language development, we often hear from parents who are eager to provide their child with an opportunity to learn another language, but can’t afford a nanny from a foreign country and don’t speak a foreign language themselves,” said , a research scientist at the 91̽�� Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences ().

A new by I-LABS researchers, published July 17 in Mind, Brain, and Education, is among the first to investigate how babies can learn a second language outside of the home. The researchers sought to answer a fundamental question: Can babies be taught a second language if they don’t get foreign language exposure at home, and if so, what kind of foreign language exposure, and how much, is needed to spark that learning?

The researchers took their query all the way to Europe, developing a play-based, intensive, English-language method and curriculum and implementing it in four public infant-education centers in Madrid, Spain. Sixteen 91̽��undergraduates and recent graduates served as tutors for the study, undergoing two weeks of training at I-LABS to learn the teaching method and curriculum before traveling to Spain. The country’s extensive public education system enabled the researchers to enroll 280 infants and children from families of varying income levels.

Based on years of I-LABS research on infant brain and language development, the method emphasizes social interaction, play, and high quality and quantity of language from the teachers. The approach uses “infant-directed speech” — often called “parentese” — the speech style parents use to talk to their babies, which has simpler grammar, higher and exaggerated pitch, and drawn-out vowels.

“Our research shows that parentese helps babies learn language,” Ferjan Ramirez said.

Babies aged 7 to 33.5 months were given one hour of English sessions a day for 18 weeks, while a control group received the Madrid schools’ standard bilingual program. Both groups of children were tested in Spanish and English at the start and end of the 18 weeks. The children also wore special vests outfitted with lightweight recorders that recorded their English learning. The recordings were analyzed to determine how many English words and phrases each child spoke.

The children who received the 91̽��method showed rapid increases in English comprehension and production, and significantly outperformed the control group peers at all ages on all tests of English. By the end of the 18-week program, the children in the 91̽��program produced an average of 74 English words or phrases per child, per hour; children in the control group produced 13 English words or phrases per child, per hour.

Ferjan Ramirez said the findings show that even babies from monolingual homes can develop bilingual abilities at this early age.

“With the right science-based approach that combines the features known to grow children’s language, it is possible to give very young children the opportunity to start learning a second language, with only one hour of play per day in an early education setting,” she said. “This has big implications for how we think about foreign-language learning.”

Follow-up testing 18 weeks later showed the children had retained what they learned. The English gains were similar between children attending the two schools serving predominantly low-income neighborhoods and the two serving mid-income areas, suggesting that wealth was not a significant factor in the infants’ ability to learn a foreign language. Children’s native language (Spanish) continued to grow as they were learning English, and was not negatively affected by introducing a second language.

“Science indicates that babies’ brains are the best learning machines ever created, and that infants’ learning is time-sensitive. Their brains will never be better at learning a second language than they are between 0 and 3 years of age,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS and a 91̽��professor of speech and hearing sciences.

The results, Kuhl said, have the potential to transform how early language instruction is approached in the United States and worldwide:

“Parents in Madrid, in the United States and around the world are eager to provide their children with an opportunity to learn a foreign language early. The U.S. census shows that 27 percent of America’s children under the age of 6 are now learning a language other than English at home. While these children are fully capable of learning both their parents’ language and English, they often do not have adequate exposure to English prior to kindergarten entry and as a result, often lag behind their peers once they enter school,” she said.

“I-LABS’ new work shows we can create an early bilingual learning environment for dual-language learners in an educational setting, and in one hour per day, infants can ignite the learning of a second language earlier and much easier than we previously thought. This is doable for everybody,” Kuhl said.

###

For more information, contact Ferjan Ramirez at naja@uw.edu or 206-747-7850 and Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or 206-685-1921.

The study was supported by the Madrid Regional Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, and the 91̽��I-LABS Ready Mind Project.

A by researchers at the 91̽�� shows that the final grades that college students received in a second-language class were predicted by a combination of genetic and brain factors.

Genetic variations of the COMT gene and a measure of the strength of the brain’s communications network — known as “white matter”— jointly accounted for 46 percent of the reason for why some students performed better than others in the language class.

“We are interested in understanding why individuals learn differently, including those who perform well and those who perform poorly,” said lead author , a research scientist at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

“Our study shows for the first time that variations of the COMT gene are related to changes in the brain’s white matter that are the result of learning,” Mamiya said.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the this week.

“We all know that human learning is highly complex and that a lot of factors play a role,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS. “Second-language learning as an adult is difficult, and we thought studying how people learn something difficult would be a good way to tease out the interactions between genes and brains in learning.”

The research team recruited first-year college students — 20-years-old on average — who had just arrived in the U.S. from China. The 79 volunteers in the study had passed the university’s minimum English requirement, and 44 of them immediately entered a three-week immersion class intended to help international students improve their English skills.

Over the course of the three-week language class and up to eight days after the class ended, the researchers performed brain scans of all the students, including a control group who had also just arrived from China but did not get into the class.

The researchers used an MRI technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which gives clues about the structure of the brain’s connections. Better structure helps signals transfer across the brain, which may lead to better learning.

The brain scans suggest that within a day of the immersive English training, white matter had already begun to change. Foreign language exposure increased the connectivity of the brain’s language circuitry in enrolled students compared with students who were not enrolled in the language class. The increase went up over the course of the three-week training, and then reversed after the training ended.

“Being able to document these associations between brain structure and environmental stimulation in young adult human brains is really exciting,” Mamiya said. “It is one of the highlights in this paper.”

Since different forms of the COMT gene can have different effects on brain structure, the researchers suspected that the students’ COMT genotype would be related to how much white matter changed from the language class.

Sure enough, using DNA samples taken from the students at the beginning of the language program, the researchers found that two specific forms of the COMT gene (Methionine/Valine or Valine/Valine) were linked to greater increases in brain connectivity in students who took the language class. Students with a third COMT genotype (Methionine/Methionine) did not show any white matter change in response to the language experience.

The combination of the COMT genotype and the white matter measure was so powerful on language learning that it accounted for 46 percent of total variance in the students’ final scores.

“Humans’ abilities in learning any particular skill vary tremendously, and we want to know why,” Kuhl said. “Knowing why answers a basic science question about how the environment, our genes, and our brains really work, but could also lead to interventions that improve learning.”

Other co-authors of the study are Todd Richards of the 91̽��Department of Radiology, and Bradley Coe and Evan Eichler of the 91̽��Department of Genome Sciences. The National Science Foundation’s 91̽��Life Center and the Ready Mind Project at I-LABS funded the study.

###

For more information, contact Mamiya at 206-685-0361 or pcmamiya@uw.edu 0176 or Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or 206-685-1921.

Rock your baby in sync with music and you may wonder how the experience affects her and her developing brain.

A new by scientists at the 91̽��’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows that a series of play sessions with music improved 9-month-old babies’ brain processing of both music and new speech sounds.

“Our study is the first in young babies to suggest that experiencing a rhythmic pattern in music can also improve the ability to detect and make predictions about rhythmic patterns in speech,” said lead author , a postdoctoral researcher at I-LABS.

“This means that early, engaging musical experiences can have a more global effect on cognitive skills,” Zhao said.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the study this week.

“Infants experience a complex world in which sounds, lights and sensations vary constantly,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS. “The baby’s job is to recognize the patterns of activity and predict what’s going to happen next. Pattern perception is an important cognitive skill, and improving that ability early may have long-lasting effects on learning.”

Like music, language has strong rhythmic patterns. The timing of syllables helps listeners define one speech sound from another and understand what someone is saying. And it’s the ability to identify differences in speech sounds that helps babies to learn to speak.

The I-LABS researchers designed a randomized-controlled experiment to see if teaching babies a musical rhythm would help the babies with speech rhythms.

Over the course of a month, 39 babies attended 12 15-minute play sessions in the lab with their parents. In groups of about two or three, the babies sat with their parents, who guided them through the activities.

In the 20 babies assigned to the music group, recordings of children’s music played while an experimenter led the babies and their parents through tapping out the beats in time with the music.

All the songs were in triple meter — like in a waltz — which the researchers chose for being relatively difficult for babies to learn.

The 19 babies in the control group attended play sessions that did not involve music. Instead, they played with toy cars, blocks and other objects that required coordinated movements without music.

“In both the music and control groups, we gave babies experiences that were social, required their active involvement and included body movements — these are all characteristics that we know help people learn,” Zhao said. “The key difference between the play groups was whether the babies were moving to learn a musical rhythm.”

Within a week after the play sessions ended, the families came back to the lab so the babies’ brain responses could be measured. The researchers used (MEG) to see the precise location and timing of brain activity.

While sitting in the brain scanner, the babies listened to a series of music and speech sounds, each played out in a rhythm that was occasionally disrupted. The babies’ brains would show a particular response to indicate they could detect the disruption.

The researchers focused their analyses on two brain regions, the auditory cortex and the prefrontal cortex, which is important for cognitive skills such as controlling attention and detecting patterns.

Babies in the music group had stronger brain responses to the disruption in both music and speech rhythm in both the auditory and the prefrontal cortex, compared with babies in the control group.

This suggests that participation in the play sessions with music improved the infants’ ability to detect patterns in sounds.

“Schools across our nation are decreasing music experiences for our children, saying they are too expensive,” Kuhl said. “This research reminds us that the effects of engaging in music go beyond music itself. Music experience has the potential to boost broader cognitive skills that enhance children’s abilities to detect, expect and react quickly to patterns in the world, which is highly relevant in today’s complex world.”

Funders of the research were the National Science Foundation 91̽��LIFE Center, the Ready Mind Project at I-LABS, and the Washington State Life Sciences Discovery Fund.

Many brain studies show that bilingual adults have more activity in areas associated with executive function, a set of mental abilities that includes problem-solving, shifting attention and other desirable cognitive traits.

Now new findings reveal that this bilingualism-related difference in brain activity is evident as early as 11 months of age, just as babies are on the verge of producing their first words.

“Our results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function,” said , lead author and a research scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences () at the 91̽��.

“This suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally,” she said.

The study also gives evidence that the brains of babies from bilingual families remain more open to learning new language sounds, compared with babies from monolingual families.

The study was  April 4 in Developmental Science and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal.

“Monolingual babies show a narrowing in their perception of sounds at about 11 months of age — they no longer discriminate foreign-language sounds they successfully discriminated at 6 months of age,” said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS.

“But babies raised listening to two languages seem to stay ‘open’ to the sounds of novel languages longer than their monolingual peers, which is a good and highly adaptive thing for their brains to do,” Kuhl said.

The researchers used magnetoencephalography (), which measures magnetic changes given off by active nerve cells. Unlike other brain-imaging methods, MEG can precisely pinpoint both the timing and location of activity in the brain.

The study is the first to use MEG to do whole-brain analyses comparing activation patterns in response to speech sounds in babies raised in monolingual and bilingual households.

In the experiment, 16 11-month-old babies — eight from English-only households and eight from Spanish-English households, and an even mix of demographic factors such as the family’s socioeconomic status — sat in a highchair beneath the helmet-like MEG scanner.

The babies listened to an 18-minute stream of speech sounds, such as “da’s” and “ta’s.” The stream included sounds specific to English or Spanish, and sounds shared by the two languages. (See a of the experimental set-up).

The researchers compared monolingual and bilingual babies’ brain responses to the language sounds. The most obvious difference they saw was in two brain regions associated with executive function, the prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex. In these regions, the Spanish-English bilingual babies had stronger brain responses to speech sounds, compared with English-only babies.

The findings align with brain studies in bilingual and monolingual adults, Ferjan Ramírez said. The boost bilingualism gives to executive function areas in the brain could arise from bilinguals needing to switch back and forth between languages, allowing them to routinely practice and improve executive function skills.

Other brain evidence from the study should be a relief for parents wondering if their bilingual baby is learning enough language:

• Bilingual babies displayed neural sensitivity to both English and Spanish sounds, meaning that they were learning both languages.
• Bilingual babies had the same sensitivity to English sounds as the monolingual babies, which suggests that they were learning English at the same rate as the monolingual babies.

“The 11-month-old baby brain is learning whatever language or languages are present in the environment and is equally capable of learning two languages as it is of learning one language,” Ferjan Ramírez said.

“Our results underscore the notion that not only are very young children capable of learning multiple languages, but that early childhood is the optimum time for them to begin,” she said.

Other co-authors of the study are Rey Ramírez, Maggie Clarke and Samu Taulu — all researchers at UW’s I-LABS. The National Science Foundation 91̽��LIFE Center funded the research.