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A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

A new study, conducted by Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, revealed the following: the more time children between the ages of six months and two years spent using handheld screens such as smartphones, tablets and electronic games, the more likely they were to experience speech delays. In the study, which involved nearly 900 children, parents reported the amount of time their children spent using screens in minutes per day at age 18 months. Researchers then used an infant toddler checklist, a validated screening tool, to assess the children's language development also at 18 months. They looked at a range of things, including whether the child uses sounds or words to get attention or help and puts words together, and how many words the child uses. Twenty percent of the children spent an average of 28 minutes a day using screens, the study found. Every 30-minute increase in daily screen time was linked to a 49% increased risk of what the researchers call expressive speech delay, which is using sounds and words. Commenting on the study, Michelle MacRoy-Higgins and Carlyn Kolker, both speech pathologists/therapists and co-authors of "Time to Talk: What You Need to Know About Your Child's Speech and Language Development," offered this advice: interact with your child. The best way to teach them language is by interacting with them, talking with them, playing with them, using different vocabulary, pointing things out to them and telling them stories.

Dr. Michael Rich is the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders. Rich notes some major takeaways: 1.Babies' brains are elastic: the first three years of life are critical for both language and overall brain development. Unlike other animals, humans are born with embryonic brains, rendering babies helpless and in need of caregivers while also providing a developmental advantage: allowing us to build our brains in response to the challenges and stimuli of the environment we're in," In the first three years of life, the brain triples in volume due to synaptic connections, therefore stimuli and challenges babies receive within that time frame help babies build creative, flexible and resilient brains. 2. Face to face interaction is valuable. 3. It's not just about screen time duration, but the type of content being consumed. For example, young children can interact meaningfully via Facetime, if they've previously interacted with that person. However, screens as a distraction for kids in lieu of human interaction= not good.

This article talks about how screen time affects babies language development. The first nine months of a baby's life are important for a child to understand sounds and how they should be used. They are able to understand language much earlier than they actually start talking. Many doctors and scientists encourage parents to communicate with their babies as soon as possible to develop language. Recent studies found that babies that spent more time in front of a screen than talking suffered in language development. I found it interesting that not all screen time is necessarily bad for a child's language development. For example, FaceTime can be beneficially for children because they are interacting in a meaningful way but using screens as a distraction for kids can be harmful.

Article discusses the negative impacts of parent screen time and digital device distraction on parent-child communication, conversational interaction, and language development, especially in young children.

The key takeaways: 1. Ensuring rich, socially-contextualized language exposure in both languages. Pediatricians advise non-English-speaking parents to read aloud and sing and tell stories and speak with their children in their native languages, so the children get that rich and complex language exposure, along with sophisticated content and information, rather than the more limited exposure you get from someone speaking a language in which the speaker is not entirely comfortable. 2. Exposure has to be person-to-person; screen time doesn't count for learning language in young children - even one language - though kids can learn content and vocabulary from educational screen time later on. 3. It does take longer to acquire two languages than one, says Dr. Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist who specializes in early language development. "A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you're either hearing English or Spanish," Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. They may mix the languages, but that doesn't indicate confusion. "Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it's a sign of language ability," she said. 4. If exposed to the target languages at a younger age, children generally will sound more nativelike. On the other hand, older children may learn more easily. Gigliana Melzi, a developmental psychologist and associate professor of applied psychology, states, "The younger you are, the more head start you have," she said. "The older you are, the more efficient learner you are, you have a first language you can use as a bootstrap."

Technology is a huge part of our lives. Nowadays, where we work, where we learn, how we communicate, and how we stay connected to each other are all surrounded by technology. We may not think about this when we're around these tech devices but it affects our mental health, and not always in a positive way. This article discusses how technology impacts us and our mental health, and what we can do to balance it out!

Born between 1995 and 2012, teens are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet. There is compelling evidence that the devices we've placed in young people's hands are having profound effects on their lives-and making them seriously unhappy.. Some interesting (and disturbing) findings: 1. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 2. While teens are physically safer than they've ever been, they're also more isolated and more subject to psychological harm. Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. In addition, the number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It's not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. 3. Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy. 4. Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today's teens. Boys' depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls' increased by 50 percent-more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. While boys tend to bully one another physically, girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim's social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform to ostracize and exclude other girls 24/7. 5. Sleep deprivation: nearly all teens sleep with their phones in close proximity, and the devices are interfering with sleep: Many teens now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is signific

A traveling journalist in Beijing utilizes both Baidu (China's version of Google) and Google voice-translation apps with mixed results. You speak into the apps, they listen and then translate into the language you choose. They do it in writing, by displaying text on the screen as you talk; and out loud, by using your phone's speaker to narrate what you've said once you're done talking. Typically exchanges are brief: 3-4 turns on average for Google, 7-8 for Baidu's translate app. Both Google and Baidu use machine learning to power their translation technology. While a human linguist could dictate all the rules for going from one language to another, that would be tedious, and yield poor results because a lot of languages aren't structured in parallel form. So instead, both companies have moved to pattern recognition through "neural machine translation." They take a mountain of data - really good translations - and load it into their computers. Algorithms then mine through the data to look for patterns. The end product is translation that's not just phrase-by-phrase, but entire thoughts and sentences at a time. Not surprisingly, sometimes translations are successes, and other times, epic fails. Why? As Macduff Hughes, a Google executive, notes, "there's a lot more to translation than mapping one word to another. The cultural understanding is something that's hard to fully capture just in translation."

It was found that kids who frequently use smartphones have delays in expressive speech. In an experiment, it was shown that for every 30 minutes of screen time, there was a 49% increased chance of speech delay. Even if parents are showing children educational videos, it's more important to have face-to-face interactions

Screens have changed our reading patterns from the linear, left-to-right sequence of years past to a wild skimming and skipping pattern as we hunt for important words and information. One 2006 study of the eye movements of 232 people looking at Web pages found they read in an "F" pattern, scanning all the way across the top line of text but only halfway across the next few lines, eventually sliding their eyes down the left side of the page in a vertical movement toward the bottom. None of this is good for our ability to comprehend deeply, scientists say. Reading text punctuated with links leads to weaker comprehension than reading plain text, several studies have shown. A 2007 study involving 100 people found that a multimedia presentation mixing words, sounds and moving pictures resulted in lower comprehension than reading plain text did. Slow reading means a return to a continuous, linear pattern, in a quiet environment free of distractions. Advocates recommend setting aside at least 30 to 45 minutes in a comfortable chair far from cellphones and computers. Some suggest scheduling time like an exercise session. Many recommend taking occasional notes to deepen engagement with the text.

The typical teenager has 300 Facebook friends and 79 Twitter followers, the Pew Internet and American Life project found in its report, Teens, Social Media, and Privacy. And some have many more. The 2013 study also says the norms around privacy are changing, and the majority of teens post photos and personal information about themselves for all their on-line contacts to see.

Alexia LaFata in Culture Texting is the biggest catch-22 of our time. We love it for its convenience and fun Emojis, but we probably don't notice just how much it's making us feel like sh*t. Everybody loves the feeling of the little red (1) on the screen, but what about when you're waiting for an answer that never comes?

Because each individual and gender values and perceives sending and receiving text messages unequally, it is often difficult to assume the intent of a person's text message. Due to assumptions, social normality conditions, and the expectations people have on each other, the objective of a person's message can get lost in the receiver's translation and perception of the text.

An unreleased study tracked infants', a group with autistic older siblings and another without, gaze when shown a video of an adult speaking while surrounded by toys. The two groups had similar times in watching the screen and mouth and face of the actor as a whole. But it was shown that the younger siblings may not internalize the linguistic clues that help babies learn language.

This article focussed on how the covid lockdown had affected the language acquisition of children, ranging from about 1 to 3 years old. It talked about how screen use was shown to lower the amount of words learned during the same periods of time as compared to face to face interaction with another person.