At Rutgers, neuroscience professor Dr. Paula Tallal and Dr. April Benasich use simple and high-tech methods to measure how quickly a baby processes a series of beeps of differing pitches.
By following the babies for years, Tallal said, they have found that "the single best predictor of language development across the population is individual differences in how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information" at extremely young ages. That speed was an even better predictor of later trouble than whether a baby came from a family with known language problems.
The Rutgers group works with 6-month-olds, but German researchers have found a similar effect in 2-month-olds, and a Finnish group even found differences in the way 2-week-olds processed sounds, Tallal said.
In an upcoming issue of the journal Neuropsychologia, Benasich and colleagues report that children who processed sounds slowly at 6 months also tended to have less developed language skills at age 2. Such testing "during infancy, may, in the not too distant future be a useful tool for early screening," she wrote.
The next question, say Benasich and Tallal, is whether a baby identified as a slow processor can be helped to become a faster one.
Benasich's lab is now setting up pilot studies for slower-processing infants, she said, to try "to nudge the baby very gently onto an optimal processing path" - by changing the child's focus to sounds it hears around it, for example.
More information on that optimal processing path, please. And of course, I'm remembering Prima, less than a month old, not responding to the alarm system when it accidentally went off in the house. She flunked an OAE at birth, and I took her for a hearing test when she was a year old. I was told her hearing was grossly normal at that point. I'm sure it was. And I still see some processing delays. If I ask her a question and she takes awhile to answer it, I'm almost guaranteed a right answer.
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