A new study co-authored by an Indian-origin Cambridge University neuroscientist claims that singing rhymes and alphabets to babies helps them with language learning. Professor Usha Goswami is among researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, who jointly investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year for their findings published on Friday in the Nature Communications journal.

They concluded that parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months. The new study suggests that rhythmic speech helps babies learn language by emphasising the boundaries of individual words and is effective even in the first months of life.