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
Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gary F. Marcus, New York University psychologist and head of the Infant Language Learning Center, about how computing, genetic biology and psychology together can help probe the wonders of human language development.
Read the article at Scientific American
When Deb Roy and his wife have guests over to see their two-and-a-half-year-old son—the couple is withholding his name to protect his privacy—the first thing they do is ask their visitors to fill out a consent form. Unusual, for sure, but the couple is merely trying to make people aware that their actions and voices may be captured by the 11 fish-eye cameras and 14 microphones hidden around their Cambridge, Mass., home listening in on nearly every sound their son has ever uttered. The short-term goal is to understand how children acquire language; the long-term goal is to use the intelligence gleaned to teach robots to talk, too. …
Read the full news article at Scientific American
For children who struggle to learn language, the choice between various interventions may matter less than the intensity and format of the intervention, a new study sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) suggests. …
Children learn by imitating adults—so much so that they will rethink how an object works if they observe an adult taking unnecessary steps when using that object, according to a Yale study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read the full news article at Yale University news room
Researchers find that oral reading tests fail to distinguish between children who can’t understand words on a page and those who have language problems that make it difficult to prove their reading competence verbally. Children with these so-called “word-finding” difficulties can’t manage to say out loud what they read on the page. The researchers estimate that as many as ten percent of all children may have these speech language problems. The study recommends silent reading tests and limited use of oral ones. …
Read the full news article at Newswise Education News
Most babies can detect the difference between sounds like “bih” and “dih” by the age of 17 months. Not so children raised in bilingual households, it seems. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning. They also ignore sounds that don’t play a significant role in speaking their native tongue, according to a study by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. …
Read the full news release at the University of Pennsylvania News Room
Infants who are raised in bilingual homes learned two similar-sounding words in a laboratory task at a later age than babies who are raised in homes where only one language is spoken. This difference, which is thought to be advantageous for bilingual infants, appears to be due to the fact that bilingual babies need to devote their attention to the general associations between words and objects (often a word in each language) for a longer period, rather than focusing on detailed sound information. This finding suggests an important difference in the mechanics of how monolingual and bilingual babies learn language. …
Read the full article at EurekAlert
Researchers Greg Bryant and Clark Barrett, at the University of California, Los Angeles, propose that the relationships between sounds and intentions are universal, and thus, should be understood by anyone regardless of the language they speak. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
The scientists found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. …
Read the full science news article at EurekAlert
The findings indicate that the mental structures and the psychological reasoning skills allowing us predict other’s behavior are in place at a very young age and their development does not entirely rely upon the environment or associative learning mechanisms. Surian proposes that “infants who expect agents’ behavior to be guided by such internally available information thereby exhibit an ability to attribute mental content — and this is mind reading proper, however rudimentary.” …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Researchers have long known that children experience a vocabulary explosion at about 18 months of age, suddenly learning words at a much faster rate. Conventional theory offered complex explanations for the phenomenon, but new research by a University of Iowa professor suggests far simpler mechanisms may be involved: word repetition, variations in the difficulty of words, and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once. …
Read the full news release at the University of Iowa News Services
Based on the size of Heschl’s Gyrus (HG), a brain structure that typically accounts for no more than 0.2 percent of entire brain volume, the researchers found they could predict — even before exposing study participants to an invented language — which participants would be more successful in learning 18 words in the “pseudo” language. …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
All babies can grow up speaking any language, but now researchers have uncovered evidence that genes may in fact play a part in learning so-called “tonal languages”, such as Chinese. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
No Comments - Add a comment