Babies Need Free Tongue Movement To Decipher Some Sounds

Teething isn't a stress-free period for babies, and it tends to go through a number of teethers. However, there is a link between its tongue movements and its ability to differentiate between speech sounds, according to scienceworldreport.

If the baby is chewing teething toys in order to overcome teething stress, research shows in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that teething toys can inhibit babies that are only six months old from making out the difference between different Hindi "d" sounds.

Even though they can identify the differences between the hard and light 'd', babies' teethers inhibit their ability to move their tongues.

Without teethers, it is easier for the babies to move their tongues and distinguish between the different sounds.

While the study does not suggest that parents should remove teethers from the babies, the question is "how much time infants need with 'free' tongue movement for speech perception to develop normally," according to sciencedaily.

Moreover, babies that have motor impairments such as "cleft palate, tongue-tie or paralysis" can also be studied in order to arrive at what needs to be done to help them.

"This study indicates that the freedom to make small gestures with their tongue and other articulators when they listen to speech may be an important factor in babies' perception of the sounds," concluded senior author Janet Werker, professor in the UBC Department of Psychology.