Lingformant » Language acquisition

Infants do not appear to learn words from educational DVDs

Vili Maunula — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:58:56 +0000

Among 12- to 24-month old children who view educational baby videos, there does not appear to be evidence that overall general language learning improves or that words featured in the programming are learned.

Full article: EurekAlert

Bilingual babies: The roots of bilingualism in newborns

Vili Maunula — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:48:26 +0000

According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, infants born to bilingual mothers (who spoke both languages regularly during pregnancy) exhibit different language preferences than infants born to mothers speaking only one language.

Full article: e! Science News

A mother’s sensitivity may help language growth in children with autism spectrum disorder

Vili Maunula — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:42:09 +0000

A new study by researchers from the University of Miami shows that maternal sensitivity may influence language development among children who go on to develop autism. Although parenting styles are not considered as a cause for autism, this report examines how early parenting can promote resiliency in this population.

Full article: EurekAlert

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

Vili Maunula — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:21:44 +0000

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

Conversing helps language development more than reading alone

Vili Maunula — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:06:30 +0000

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

Study Contradicts Conventional Wisdom that Perceptual Abilities Improve as We Grow

Vili Maunula — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:56:04 +0000

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

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

Vili Maunula — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:47:30 +0000

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

Deaf children use hands to invent own way of communicating

Vili Maunula — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:53:10 +0000

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

Newborn infants detect the beat in music

Vili Maunula — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:11:00 +0000

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

Vili Maunula — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:08:38 +0000

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

What happens when a child acquires a new mother tongue?

Vili Maunula — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 07:18:16 +0000

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

Full article: AlphaGalileo

Babies communicate from birth

Vili Maunula — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:56:18 +0000

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

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

Vili Maunula — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:59:42 +0000

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

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

Vili Maunula — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:43:41 +0000

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

Vili Maunula — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:38:28 +0000

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