Saturday, October 24, 2009

Infants able to identify humans as source of speech, monkeys as source of monkey calls

Filed under: Language acquisition

Infants as young as five months old are able to correctly identify humans as the source of speech and monkeys as the source of monkey calls, psychology researchers have found. Their finding, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides the first evidence that human infants are able to correctly match different kinds of vocalizations to different species.

Full article: EurekAlert



Sunday, July 5, 2009

Conversing helps language development more than reading alone

Filed under: Language acquisition

UCLA study finds that activities that get children 2 months to 48 months talking are most conducive to language acquisition

Full article: University of California Newsroom



Thursday, June 25, 2009

Study Contradicts Conventional Wisdom that Perceptual Abilities Improve as We Grow

Filed under: Language acquisition

A study of Spanish- and English- learning infants provides evidence that our perceptual abilities do not improve as we get older, and that younger infants may actually be better at integrating facial speech gestures and vocalizations than older infants. The developmental decline in this ability may be due to increasing specialization for native-language phonology as infants learn their own speech and language.

Full article: Newswise



Saturday, June 13, 2009

Language use decreases in young children and caregivers when television is on, study finds

Filed under: Language acquisition

In a new study, young children and their adult caregivers uttered fewer vocalizations, used fewer words and engaged in fewer conversations when in the presence of audible television.

Full article: EurekAlert



Sunday, March 8, 2009

Deaf children use hands to invent own way of communicating

Filed under: Language acquisition

Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language, research at the University of Chicago shows.

Full article: EurekAlert



Thursday, January 29, 2009

Newborn infants detect the beat in music

Filed under: Language acquisition

Researchers at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam demonstrated that two to three day old babies can detect the beat in music. This phenomenon – termed ‘beat induction’ – is likely to have contributed to music’s origin. It enables such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. Beat induction is also considered to be uniquely human. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo, do not synchronise their behaviour to rhythmic sounds. …

Full article: Physorg



Revolutionary approach to learning languages

Filed under: Language acquisition

The teaching of languages could be revolutionised following ground-breaking research by Victoria University PhD graduate Paul Sulzberger. Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns—even if you haven’t a clue what it all means. …

Full article: Victoria University of Wellington



Monday, December 22, 2008

What happens when a child acquires a new mother tongue?

Filed under: Language acquisition

Up to a third of the children adopted to Norway from abroad are having problems with language proficiency.

Full article: AlphaGalileo



Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Babies communicate from birth

Filed under: Language acquisition

Babies are born with a strong motivation to communicate with us, to understand and to be understood, a new study from researchers at the University of Dundee has shown.

Full article: University of Dundee



Saturday, November 15, 2008

Baby talk: The roots of the early vocabulary in infants’ learning from speech

Filed under: Language acquisition

Although babies typically start talking around 12 months of age, their brains actually begin processing certain aspects of language much earlier, so that by the time they start talking, babies actually already know hundreds of words. While studying language acquisition in infants can be a challenging endeavor, researchers have begun to make significant progress that changes previous views of what infants learn, according to a new report by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Daniel Swingley. The report, published in the October issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes an increasing emphasis among researchers in studying vocabulary development in infants.

Full article: EurekAlert



Saturday, November 8, 2008

A study explains why some people have a better head for languages

Filed under: Language acquisition

Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences.

Full article: AlphaGalileo.Org



World-first device may help solve child language mystery

Filed under: Language acquisition

Researchers are one step closer to understanding why children can learn languages far more easily than adults, thanks to a world-first device that allows scientists to measure the magnetic fields generated by a child’s brain.

Full Article: Physorg.com



Sunday, September 14, 2008

Breakthrough in understanding of speech offers hope to the deaf

Filed under: Language acquisition

Scientists on Sunday said intelligible speech is learnt in part through nerve signals from the vocal tract, a discovery that could open up an ambitious avenue of therapy for the deaf. …

Full article: Physorg



Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Secret Of Newborn’s First Words Revealed

Filed under: Language acquisition

A new study could explain why “daddy” and “mommy” are often a baby’s first words – the human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns. …

Full article: Science Daily



Friday, May 2, 2008

Intuitive Grammar Develops By Age Six, Say Researchers

Filed under: Language acquisition

Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults. …

Full article: Science Daily