London - Premature babies may benefit from being talked to while still in intensive care, a study claims.
Researchers found that babies who were exposed to more talking from adults, such as their parents, as they were being treated in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), tended to score higher on development tests when older.
They said that while a baby in the womb can hear its mother’s voice, those born prematurely are exposed to constant noises from monitors and machines.
The US researchers studied 36 babies that were medically stable but born before 32 weeks of pregnancy and kept in a NICU. A baby is considered full term if it is born between 39 and 41 weeks of pregnancy.
The babies in the study wore vests equipped with devices to record and analyse conversations and background noises. Overall, the researchers found that an increased amount of adult talk in the NICU was tied to higher language and thinking scores during tests when the babies were seven months and 18 months old.
Dr Betty Vohr, of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Women And Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, said: “Early exposure in the NICU of pre-term infants to higher numbers of adult words is positively correlated with cognitive and language outcomes after discharge. Talking to children is a really good thing to do.” - Daily Mail