Lullabies Enrich Child Linguistic Development

Abstract

This research paper confers the importance of lullabies being sung to children, commencing from the pre-linguistic stage of language acquisition until the end of the first few years of the infancy. Thus, this report deals with the contributory linguistic factors that lullabies bear in triggering the language acquisition of infants apart from the first language cues that they receive and perceive through the speech that the adults use to communicate with them. The intention of this is to determine the whole-scale linguistic significance of lullabies, which are a universally shared experience within the human race. This paper once again investigates whether lullabies are mere sleep inducing melodies or whether they possess distinctive traits that reinforce language cues to the highly absorbent infant brain. The research was conducted using two methodologies: Questionnaire in the Sinhalese language was issued to twenty eight mothers, who have children below or of the age of three years, to provide personal and authentic responses, and a linguistic analysis of a Sinhala lullaby was done using the linguistic knowledge of the researcher. However, there could be different theories regarding this since actual baby brain image in the presence of lullabies was absent in the course of this research. Consequently, the results reveal that lullabies enrich the child linguistic development and thereby suggest the necessity to diverge the linguistic eye on lullabies as a rich resource which evokes and feeds diverse linguistic skills. Lullabies do not reach the heights as parentese do, but they are a rich resource which ensures informal education of an infant‟s first language. Hence, this research outlines the value of incorporating lullabies to communicate with children and assertively recommends their usage.