How Baby Talk Gives Infant Brains a Boost? Different IELTS Reading Passage and Their Possible Questions

Want to know how you can prepare yourself well for the IELTS reading passage? Well, it’s easy to do so. The only thing one is required to do is to try and solve a lot of reading passages. This will help an individual to easily be able to solve a passage in the examination.

Given below is a passage that will help you to know what type of questions are asked in the examination and how to solve them.

How does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 1

The typical way of talking to a baby – high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious – is a source of fascination for linguists who hope to understand how “baby talk” impacts learning. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant babies. Some research even suggests that infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born, gathering the basic building blocks of their family’s native tongue.

How Does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 2

Early language exposure seems to have benefits to the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information. So how does the sweet if the sometimes absurd sound of infant-directed speech influences a baby’s development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby talk.

How Does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 3

Fathers don’t use baby talk as often in the same ways as other mothers – and that’s perfectly OK, according to a new study. Mark Van Dam of Washington State University at Spokane and colleagues equipped parents with recording devices and speech-recognition software to study the way they interacted with their youngsters during a normal day. ‘We found that moms do exactly what you’d expect and what’s been described many times over.’ VanDam explains, ‘But we found that dads aren’t doing the same thing. Dads didn’t raise their pitch or fundamental frequency when they talked to kids.’ Their role may be rooted in what is called the bridge hypothesis, which dates back to 1975. It suggests that fathers use less familial language to provide their children with a bridge to the kind of speech they’ll hear in public. The idea is that a kid gets to practice a certain kind of speech with mom and another kind of speech with dad, so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of speech to practice,’ says VanDam.

How Does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 4

Scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies, fitting 26 children with audio-recording vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, they found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless of socioeconomic status. Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk or standard speech,’ says NairanRamirez-Esparza of the University of Connecticut. “We also found that it really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one context,” she adds. The more parents use baby talk one-on-one, the more babies babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life.”

How Does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 5

Another study suggests that parents might want to pair their youngsters up so they can babble more with their own kind. Researchers from McGill University and University du Quebec a Montreal found that babies seem to like listening to each other rather than to adults – which may be why baby talk is such a universal tool among parents. They played repeating vowel sounds made by a special synthesizing device that mimicked sounds made by either an adult woman or another baby. This way, only the impact of the auditory cues was observed. The team then measured how long each type of sound held the infants’ attention.

How Does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 6

They found that the “infant” sounds held babies’ attention nearly 40 per cent longer. The baby noises also induced more reactions in the listening infants, like smiling, or lip moving, which approximates sound making. The team theorizes that this attraction to other infant sounds could help launch the learning process that leads to speech. It may be some property of the sound that is just drawing their attention,’ says study co-author Linda Polka. “Or maybe they are starting to focus on their own ability to make sounds. We are speculating here but it might catch their attention because they recognize it as a sound they could possibly make.”

How Does Baby Talk Give Infant Brains a Boost? IELTS Reading Passage Part 7

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, a total of 57 babies from two slightly different age groups – seven months and eleven and a half months – were played with a number of syllables from both their native language (English) and a non-native tongue (Spanish). The infants were placed in a brain-activation scanner that recorded activity in a brain region known to guide the motor movements that produce speech. The results suggest that listening to baby talk prompts infant brains to start practising their language skills. Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start and suggests that seven-months-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the rights movements that will produce words,’ says co-author Patricia Kuhl. Another interesting finding was that while the seven-month-olds responded to all speech sounds regardless of language, the brains of the older infants worked harder at the motor activations of non-native sounds compared to native sounds. The study may have also uncovered a process by which babies recognize differences between their native language and other tongues.

IELTS Preparation Questions: Vocabulary

Q1. What is the synonym of bairn?

Ans: Infants

Q2. What is the synonym of sound?

Ans: Noise

Q3. What is the synonym of Jabber?

Ans: Babble

Q4. What is the synonym of Lexicon?

Ans: Vocabulary

Q5. What is the synonym of Begetter?

Ans: Father

IELTS Preparation Questions: Complete the Passage

#1. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the ________________, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant babies.

Ans: Womb

#2. _________________ use less familial language so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of speech to practice.

Ans: Fathers

#3. _______________________________ seems to have benefits to the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information.

Ans: Early Language Exposure

IELTS Preparation Questions: Answer the Following Questions

Question. By looking at the following statements and the options given, answer who said these remarks.

Options:

#1. Mark VanDam

#2. Nairan Ramirez-Esparza

#3. Patricia Kuhl

Statement 1: Children learn diverse languages with the help of their parents who speak different languages altogether. Fathers never talk to their kids in their familiar language and this is how kids learn two languages because the mother speaks a different language and the father another.

Ans: Mark VanDam

Statement 2: According to a report, it had been found out that kids who listened to baby talks more than the adults speaking in front of them talked more as compared to the others.

Ans: Nairan Ramirez-Esparza

Statement 3: How much the kids’ talk depends on how much their parents use baby talk. So the more their parents used the baby talk, the more words their kids produce later in life.

Ans: Nairan Ramirez-Esparza

IELTS Preparation Tips

#1. The IELTS Exam requires an individual to focus on the areas that they are lagging behind in the English language. This exam requires an individual to improve their English language and add as many words as they can to their vocabulary.

#2. Time Constraints are an important thing for the IELTS Exam, so if you have started your preparation for this test, keep in mind the time even while preparing so that it becomes easy for you to complete the paper on time.

#3. Know the paper in detail and be aware of everything that is going to come in the test so that it’s easy for you to begin your preparation and get a good band score – as high as possible.

Conclusion

We really hope that you must have found the above information useful and this passage interesting and you must have understood how to prepare the answers for the different types of questions being asked. If you want to know more, feel free to comment down below and let us know about the same.

Looking for more information? Check out our amazing yet informative blogs on our site.