Study Shows That Mother’s Mood can Impact Baby's Ability to Speak

The infant-directed-speech or baby talk is a specialised type of speech that adults use while communicating with infants. This usually includes more inflection and repetition. Infant-directed speech varies greatly in pitch, where certain parts of words are emphasised and uttered more clearly, thus attracting the focus of the newborn's attention to what has been said. The infant-directed speech has been proven to be a significant prerequisite for the successful development of language amongst newborns.

Now a new research has shown that a mother's mood, especially during the postpartum period, affects her infant’s language development.

A study conducted by the researchers of Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences reported that mothers' mood is important and linked to the language development of the infant. Especially those mothers who suffer from mild depressive conditions in the postpartum period, even without the need for medical intervention, which can also impact their baby's learning. Babies in such conditions are found to have acquired delayed language development. The reason for it may be due to the way women talk to their newborns, the researchers opine.

The new findings, as experts consider, can be helpful in preventing deficits amongst newborns at an early stage.

The postpartum period signifies the period after childbirth when the physiological changes associated with pregnancy return to the state that was before pregnancy started. A common issue amongst mothers in the postpartum period is the feeling of depression, commonly known as 'baby blues.

The baby blues conditions, like feeling sad, empty or hopeless, normally wane within a few days or weeks. In fact, the majority of mothers, up to 70%, develop the baby blues. It has been known that this condition can impact children's development. However, there was no clarity on how the depressive situation interferes with language development in infants.

In the recent Max Planck study, the researchers investigated how babies could learn how to distinguish speech sounds from one another and how it depends on the mother’s mood. Importantly, this early step is considered an important prerequisite for the further steps needed for a well-developed language. The basis of it is that if the sounds can be distinguished properly from one another, then words can also be distinguished from one another.

The new study found that mothers with more negative moods till two months after birth will have their children show, on average, a lacking of mature processing of speech sounds when they reach the age of six months. Explaining the matter, the study's first author GesaSchaadt, a post doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, commented in a statement—"We suspect that the affected mothers use less infant-directed-speech. They probably use less pitch variation when directing speech to their infants. This also leads to a more limited perception of different pitches in the children. This perception, in turn, is considered a prerequisite for further language development.”

The findings hint at the paramount importance of infant-directed speech used by parents for developing language in their babies.

“To ensure the proper development of young children, appropriate support is also needed for mothers who suffer from mild upsets that often do not yet require treatment. That doesn't necessarily have to be organised intervention measures. Sometimes it just takes the fathers to be more involved,"—commentedSchaadt further.

The Max Planck team of researchers used a cohort of 46 mothers who reported having different moods after childbirth. The researchers assessed their moods with the help of a standardised questionnaire used in diagnosing postpartum depression. The researchers also used EEG (Electro Encephalography) in order to decipher how well the babies could distinguish between different speech sounds. The babies considered here were in the age group of two to six months.