Bai, Bai, Zhi Hua (摆摆枝花) (Swing, swing, the flower branch) – Mandarin

Chanda hai tu, mera suraj hai tu (You are the moon, you are my sun) – Hindi

Durme, durme, ijiko de madre (Sleep, sleep, mother’s little one) – Ladino

There are good reasons why lullabies can be found in languages worldwide. Not only can singing a familiar tune calm a fussy infant, but it also leads to stronger language skills. 

What is cool is that recent research shows that exposing babies to music intervention delays “perceptual narrowing,” the process of around six months when babies tune out speech sounds from any language they do not hear regularly. Singing to your baby allows them to discern non-native speech sounds for longer!

What music intervention is best for babies?

• Highly engaging, multi-sensory, movement-oriented music exposure
• Songs (with words and a melody) instead of just instrumental music
• Infant-Directed singing with exaggerated intonation, higher pitch, and a slower tempo

Around six months, infants also lose the ability to distinguish lexical tones, which are linguistically relevant pitch patterns that change the meaning of a word. Half of the world’s languages use tones to contrast word meanings. It has been shown that at nine months, infants from non-tonal native language families already find it difficult to discriminate lexical tones.

Here is an example in Mandarin of four distinctive lexical tones altering a word’s meaning:

• /shī/ in Tone 1 (high-level pitch) means “teacher”
• /shí/ in Tone 2 (low-rising pitch) means “ten”
• /shǐ/ in Tone 3 (low-dipping pitch) means “to make/use”
• /shì/ in Tone 4 (high-falling tone) means “is/are”

So, sing to babies! Singing strengthens their “shared neural mechanisms” for music and speech processing and extends their ability to discriminate non-native speech sounds, including tones.

Goodnight, sleep tight!

Read more: 

Zhao TC, Llanos F, Chandrasekaran B and Kuhl PK (2022) Language experience during the sensitive period narrows infants’ sensory encoding of lexical tones—Music intervention reverses it. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 16:941853. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2022.941853.

Hyman, L. M. (2018). What Tone Teaches Us About Language. Language, 94(3), 698–709. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26630376.

Mehr, S. A., Song, L. A., & Spelke, E. S. (2016). Singing to infants matters: Early singing interactions affect musical preferences and facilitate vocabulary building. Journal of Child Language, 43(5), 1195-1213. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000444.