You’ve probably heard about the “Baby Mozart” series of CDs that are designed to help soothe cranky toddlers, or the “Baby Bach” videos that combine music and visuals to gently stimulate a young child’s brain using melody and non-verbal images. The company that makes these products, Baby Einstein (now owned by the Disney Corporation), advertises them as being ideal ways to encourage the youngest children to interact with their surroundings, and to guide them into being interested in the world around them. Music is always popular with children, and as childcare site Nannypro notes, including music in playtime keeps children engaged and entertained. Whether it’s singing lullabies to babies or joining a two-year-old in a quick disco dance routine, parents and babysitters have always turned to music at some point.

As a recent study points out, however, music isn’t just for entertainment purposes. Researchers at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park’s Language and Music Cognition Lab say that for babies, music can also be a way of introducing language. The study notes that even before a child recognizes individual words, they still tune in to the “creative play with sound” that they hear in music, and it’s this musical aspect of language that they’ll focus on first. They are able to heart the tone and timbre (in other words, the various sounds) of the language even when they don’t know the words. As parents, we instinctively turn speech into music when we’re speaking “baby talk” with its exaggerated noises, tones, and rhythms. Other studies have shown that this form of speech – which is higher in pitch, repetitive, and sing-song – is common to “baby talk” across the world in many languages. Babies are aware of this musical aspect of language from the beginning. It’s only later that vocabulary and grammar rules are added that teach them a specific language. Because to children all languages are the same at the beginning, it’s easy for them to learn new languages. Each language is just another “song” they learn to sing.

Because the parts of the brain involved in listening to music are the same as those involved in hearing and using language, adding a musical element to your child’s life will help them learn to distinguish between new words, remember those words, and use them.

Get the link to the full study here and learn more about the connection between music and language development.