Babies Who Pick up on This Musical Skill May Have an Early Language Edge

Parents have sung lullabies to their children for thousands of years to soothe them and help them fall asleep. But research suggests that singing to your baby does far more than calm them down—it may actually help prepare their brain for learning language.

Researchers in the Netherlands found a connection between how infants process musical rhythm and how they process language. The study, published in the journal Developmental Science, showed that babies who are better at detecting rhythm in music are also better at picking up patterns in speech, a key skill for learning words.

Experts say this connection makes sense. 

“Both music and language are built on patterns—beats group together in music the same way syllables group together into words in speech,” says Jordyn Koveleski Gorman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, child development expert, pediatric feeding specialist, and founder of the online resource hub Eat Play Say. “So if a baby’s brain is good at finding and tracking patterns in sound, that skill can also support early language learning.”

Rachel Albert, PhD, a professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College and director of the LVC Baby Lab, says the findings highlight babies’ natural strengths.

“Babies are born pattern detectors,” says Dr. Albert, “and this study highlights the parallels between music and language, both of which contain highly patterned sounds.”

A Window Into Babies’ Brains

The small study involved 44 infants aged between 6 and 9 months. To see how their brains responded to sound, the researchers used EEG caps—safe, non-invasive hats that measure brain activity.

“EEG studies involving infants are always challenging, because the infants need to wear a cap with electrodes and cables attached to it on their head during the session,” explains lead study author Iris van der Wulp, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. To keep little ones comfortable—and prevent them from tugging on the wires or moving too much—researchers had babies sit on a parent’s lap and provided toys to keep their hands busy.

The infants listened to two kinds of audio. One was a stream of made-up speech with no pauses, designed so that certain syllable patterns repeated like words. The other consisted of rhythmic musical patterns. The researchers then checked whether the babies’ brain activity synchronized with these patterns.

“Infants who accurately synchronized their brainwaves to the meter of a musical rhythm also accurately synchronized their brainwaves to words in an artificial language,” says van der Wulp. “This indicates that there is indeed an overlap in the way that infants process music and language.”

Do Your Musical Skills Predict Your Baby’s Abilities?

The study also knocked a popular misconception on its head.

“It had previously been proposed that musical rhythmic abilities are genetically heritable,” says van der Wulp. “However, we did not find evidence that this was the case.”

What did matter was how often parents and babies engaged in music together. Infants whose parents reported frequently engaging in musical activities with them showed stronger rhythmic skills, which, in turn, were linked to better language skills.

“Based on these results I would recommend parents to spend time making music and listening to music together with their child, as our results indicate that this can be beneficial to both their child’s musical and linguistic development,” says van der Wulp.

Gorman adds that the finding that parent-child musical engagement mattered more than a caregiver’s own skills is a big deal and empowering for families. “You don’t need to be musical. You don’t need to sing on key,” explains Gorman. “You just need to be willing to sing, clap, bounce, and be silly with your baby.”

Why Engaging Musically With Your Child Is Important

Simply playing music in the background isn’t the same as making music together. According to Gorman, it’s the interaction that really supports early learning.

“That shared engagement is just as important as the rhythm itself,” she says. “When parents sing with their baby, they’re slowing down language, exaggerating sounds, using repetition, and pairing sound with movement and facial expressions. All of those things make it easier for a baby’s brain to start organizing and understanding speech.”

Timing and attention matter too, says Dr. Albert. Babies learn best when sounds—whether music or speech—are connected to what they’re focused on in the moment.

“Imagine an infant playing with blocks,” Dr. Albert says. “A parent responding to a babble at the blocks with speech or a song related to what the infant is doing in the moment will support learning more than talking about other activities they could do or providing a non-stop narrative about the blocks." 

What These Findings Do (And Don’t) Mean

So, should you sign your kid up for a music class? Not necessarily.

"What I’d really want parents to take away from this is not, ‘I need to start formal music lessons with my 6‑month‑old,’ but rather, ‘The everyday stuff I’m already doing actually matters,’” says Gorman. “Singing during diaper changes, clapping during play, bouncing during a song, making up silly chants during bath time—those are developmentally meaningful. Connection over perfection. If you’re engaging with your baby, talking, singing, playing, and responding to them, you’re already doing a lot to support their language development.”

She also cautions parents against reading too much into a single study. While the research shows a link between rhythm skills and language learning, “it doesn’t mean that if your baby isn’t super into music, they’re going to struggle with language,” she says. “Development is not that black and white. Babies have lots of different strengths, and there are many pathways to strong language skills. Rhythm may be one helpful piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole picture.”

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