Keep it simple, short and repetitive! That’s what an international team of neurological researchers covered in PhysOrg.com found when they scanned infants’ brains while saying, “goo goo goo!”:
…University of British Columbia post-doctoral fellow Judit Gervain and a team of researchers from Italy and Chile documented brain activities of 22 newborns (2-3 days old) when exposed to recordings of made-up words.
The researchers mixed words that end in repeating syllables – such as “mubaba” and “penana” – with words without repetition – such as “mubage” and “penaku.” They found increased brain activities in the temporal and left frontal areas of the newborns’ brain whenever the repetitious words were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitions (“bamuba” or “napena”) elicited no distinctive responses from the brain.
Mama. Papa. Banana….