Rhythmic structure facilitates learning from auditory input in newborn infants

Rhythm and metrical regularities are fundamental properties of music and poetry - and all of those are used in the interaction between infants and their parents. Music and rhythm perception have been shown to support auditory and language skills. Here we compare newborn infants' learning from a song, a nursery rhyme, and normal speech for the first time in the same study. Infants' electrophysiological brain responses revealed that the nursery...