Sing to your baby for double the calm

Sing nursery rhymes to your baby and you'll keep him calm twice as long as if you just talked to him, new research from the University of Montreal has found.

Us adults and older children often lose ourselves in music — a phenomenon known for scientists as "entrainment" – and researchers wanted to test whether babies have the same ability.

Because babies can't tap their feet, nod their heads or drum along to music, it wasn't previously known whether they could become entrained by it.

To find out, researchers recruited 30 infants aged between six and nine months and played them recordings of speech (both normal adult speech and baby talk) and sung nursery rhymes.

The speech and the songs were played in the unfamiliar language Turkish, and the experiment was conducted in dark, undecorated rooms, to ensure the babies were only reacting to the recordings.

While listening to the Turkish song, the babies remained calm for about nine minutes. For speech, it was roughly only half as long. Surprisingly, baby-talk didn't keep the infants calm for much longer than regular speech.

"The lack of significant distinction between the two types of speech came as a surprise to us," explained Mariève Corbeil, one of the study's authors.

"Every parent knows it's not much use singing Rihanna to their baby!"

Repeating the experiment with French recordings produced similar results.

"These findings speak to the intrinsic importance of music, and of nursery rhymes in particular, which appeal to our desire for simplicity, and repetition," said Corbeil in a statement, adding that nursery rhymes have a specific range of tones and rhythms that make them perfect for infants.

"Every parent knows it's not much use singing Rihanna to their baby!" she quipped.

Professor Isabelle Peretz, of the University of Montreal's Center for Research on Brain, Music and Language, speculated that singing helpings babies and children develop emotional self-control.

The researchers encouraged parents to sing to their children more often, believe it could be particularly useful for the parents who are challenged by "adverse socioeconomic or emotional circumstances".