Getting Sharp: Want a Brainier Baby?

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This is borne out by a new study of 96 babies conducted by Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks at the University of Washington. Meltzoff and Brooks knew that long before babies learn to talk, they form emotional connections with parents and caregivers by looking into their eyes. But there's a big cognitive leap between looking at someone's eyes and following that person's gaze to see what he or she is looking at. By tracking at what age babies learn to follow an adult's gaze, Meltzoff and Brooks have been able to establish an early indicator of language ability. It turns out that the earlier a baby follows the gaze of an adult (generally between 9 months and 11 months), the more advanced his or her language skills are at age 2.

"Babies read their mother's faces," explains Meltzoff, co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind. "Being able to read other people and their intentions and to know what they're thinking about is key to language development."

Babies can also read signs. Psychologists Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn, co-founders of the Baby Signs Institute, conducted a long-term study with 140 families funded by the National Institutes of Health to see whether teaching sign language to babies before they can talk helps or impedes language development. The results were surprising. Babies taught to sign at 11 months tested 11 months ahead of other babies in terms of vocabulary and linguistic ability by age 3. At age 8, signing babies scored higher on IQ tests than the control group. While many psychologists agree that teaching sign language probably does babies no harm, others have questioned the methodology of the research that shows signing's benefits. Moreover, the research that's been done has focused on signing as taught by trained parents. Today there are a slew of new videos and DVDs purporting to teach babies to sign, and no one has studied their effectiveness.

Of course, parents don't have to learn sign language to be active participants in their babies' development. For the past 20 years, New York University developmental psychologist Catherine Tamis-LeMonda has been observing babies as they interact with parents in "naturalistic" environments—at home, running errands, going about their everyday lives—to see how adult involvement affects language acquisition. Through longitudinal studies, she's documented that the more parents respond to babies' cries, expressions and articulations, the earlier the children will talk and the more advanced their language skills will be at age 5. Parents who respond to babies' cues—reacting to grimaces and giggles, mimicking their sounds, extrapolating from "bababa" to "bottle," labeling things they touch—help their children acquire language. This responsiveness, however, should not be forced. "If you're not enjoying yourself while playing with that baby, it's not going to do any good," Tamis-LeMonda cautions.