Medical Xpress – Amy Norton
“Reading to young children is well known to have benefits, including better language skills. And experts already urge parents to have a regular story time with their kids, starting at birth. It’s been assumed that the habit feeds youngsters’ brain development. But the new findings, published online Aug. 3 in the journal Pediatrics, offer hard evidence of that theory…Overall, Hutton’s team found, the more often children had story time at home, the more brain activity they showed while listening to stories in the research lab. The difference was seen in a brain region involved in so-called semantic processing—the ability to extract meaning from words. There was “particularly robust” activity, the researchers said, in areas where mental images are formed from what is heard.”(more)