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Our ability to hear and understand a second language becomes more and more difficult with age, but the adult brain can be retrained to pick up foreign sounds more easily again.

A new study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that children as young as two understand basic grammar rules when they first learn to speak and are not simply imitating adults. The study also applied the same statistical analysis on data from one of the most famous animal language-acquisition experiments -- Project Nim -- and showed that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language over the course of many years, never grasped rules like those in a two-year-old's grammar. "When you compare what children should say if they follow grammar against what children do say, you find it to almost indistinguishable," Professor of Linguistics Charles Yang said. "If you simulate the expected diversity when a child is only repeating what adults say, it produces a diversity much lower than what children actually say." As a comparison, Yang applied the same predictive models to the set of Nim Chimpsky's signed phrases, the only data set of spontaneous animal language usage publicly available. He found further evidence for what many scientists, including Nim's own trainers, have contended about Nim: that the sequences of signs Nim put together did not follow from rules like those in human language. Nim's signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization. This suggests that true language learning is -- so far -- a uniquely human trait, and that it is present very early in development.

A study was performed on a group of 47 nine-month-old infants to test if music could help babies learn language better. The results of the study showed that infants who listened to music were more responsive to speech than the babies who played with toys and did not listen to music. It was also concluded that music can help in social-emotional development. Two children who had never met before felt closer after they played music together. Babies were also "more likely to show helping behaviors toward an adult after the babies had been bounced in sync with the adult who was also moving rhythmically."

Quick comparison of the differences between child and adult second language learning: suggests that children will be able to attain greater fluency in L2, whereas adults will learn the L2 imperfectly.

Article talks about an adult Okinawan-language class in Hawaii. Okinawan, also known as Uchinaaguchi, is an endangered language--it fell into disuse due to Japanese colonization--hence few native speakers of the language remain. I've posted the text of the article below, as you've got to be a Star-Advertiser subscriber to see the full page: POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 27, 2013 StarAdvertiser.com Learning Okinawan helps preserve culture and identity, an instructor says By Steven Mark In a classroom for preschoolers, a group of adults is trying to revive a language that is foreign to their ear but not to their heart. The language is Okinawan, or "Uchinaaguchi," as it is pronounced in the language itself. The class at Jikoen Hongwanji Mission in Kalihi, as informal as it is, might just be the beginning of a cultural revival thousands of miles to the east of the source. At least that is the hope of Eric Wada, one of the course instructors. "For us, it's the importance of connecting (language) to identity," said Wada, who studied performing arts in Okinawa and is now the artistic director of an Okinawan performing arts group, Ukwanshin Kabudan. "Without the language, you really don't have identity as a people." Okinawa is the name given to a prefecture of Japan, but it was originally the name of the main island of an archipelago known as the Ryukyu Islands that lies about midway between Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea. For centuries, the Ryukyu kingdom maintained a degree of independence from other East Asian nations. As a result, distinctive cultural practices evolved, from graceful and meditative dance to the martial art called karate and the poetic language that sounds like a blend of Japanese and Korean. The islands were officially annexed by Japan in 1879. The 20th century saw the World War II battle of Okinawa, which claimed more than a quarter of the island's population, the subsequent placement of U.S. military bases and the return of the islands to

The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is physiological and social. The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to use digital devices, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. Posture has been proven to affect mood, behavior and memory, and frequent slouching can make us depressed, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The way we stand affects everything from the amount of energy we have to bone and muscle development, and even the amount of oxygen our lungs can take in. A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are "almost constantly" online. Adults aren't any better: Most adults spend 10 hours a day or more consuming electronic media, according to a Nielsen's Total Audience Report from last year. "Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness," said Henry Alford, the author of "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners." "That's the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you're absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else." Children now compete with their parents' devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized. Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected

This article describes and analyzes a study conducted on bilingual babies. It found that bilingual babies are able to distinguish different languages, and they don't just think there are two words for everything. The researchers would give commands in both languages and take note of eye-movement and pupil dilation. This provided insight on how the babies processed different languages. The researchers also expanded their experiment to adults, and found that adults process different languages the same way that the infants did. The article concludes that there are substantial benefits to growing up bilingual.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

Emojis are emerging as a new form of communication online, mostly used by younger generations as a way to add emotional depth to online communications. A study conducted suggests that while older generations are less confident about using emojis, they are able to interpret them, and use them with minimal errors.

When children start studying music before the age of seven, they develop bigger vocabularies, a better sense of grammar and a higher verbal IQ. These advantages benefit both the development of their mother tongue and the learning of foreign languages. During these crucial years, the brain is at its sensitive development phase, with 95% of the brain's growth occurring now. Music training started during this period also boosts the brain's ability to process subtle differences between sounds and assist in the pronunciation of languages - and this gift lasts for life, as it has been found that adults who had musical training in childhood still retain this ability to learn foreign languages quicker and more efficiently than adults who did not have early childhood music training. Humans first started creating music 500,000 years ago, yet speech and language was only developed 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary evidence, as interpreted by leading researchers such as Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, indicates that speech as a form of communication has evolved from our original development and use of music. This explains why our music and language neural networks have significant overlap, and why children who learn music become better at learning the grammar, vocabulary and pronounciation of any language.

This article talked about how adults talk to babies and why we do it. When we talk to babies, we tend to raise our pitch a little and supposedly, it calms the baby down. They also talked about a research project where they recorded adults from different parts of the world, and noticed that those who come from western places raised their pitch the most, and in remote places didn't raise their pitch that much but everyone raised their pitch at least a little. The way we talk to babies is universal and we've evolved as humans to be able to communicate with infants.

The features of baby talk - softer tone, higher pitch, almost unintelligible vocabulary - are global. Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab documented over 1,500 recordings in 21 urban, rural and Indigenous communities - making their work possibly a first of its kind experiment. The article includes samples from different languages around the world. There are many reasons why baby talk might have evolved in humans and why it might serve beneficial purposes. Some theories suggest that the way we speak accentuates the vowels of the speech and helps babies learn speech. Other theories suggest that this kind of baby talk helps regulate the baby's emotions and helps structure the social interactions we have with babies, so it helps socialize them and control their behavior and mood. In prehistoric times, having ways to interact with babies and to care for them while still being able to keep your eyes up to look out for predators and use your voice to interact with babies, might have been an important reason why we may have evolved these kinds of behaviors.

This article outlines the differences between an adult and child brain that allows children to pick up languages more efficiently. It also highlights the large effect of the environment on children, as researchers found that children tend to learn unconciously, while adults acquire language through conscious thought processes.

This site is very insightful as to the differences in language development in the brain between those that learn a second language in childhood and those that learn the language as adults. It explains briefly the idea of a critical period and discusses the interesting aspects that come along with learning a second language later in life. It mentions Broca's and Wernicke's area.

Got turned onto this course at the recent "Learning and the Brain" conference in San Francisco, as one of the presenters, Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang, an affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist, is one of the co-developers of this introductory neuroscience course: free, thanks to a generous Annenberg Foundation grant. The course units cover several topics pertinent to Words R Us, including brain anatomy; language, music, and the brain; language and brain damage; emotions, empathy, and behavior; and cognitive functioning and development as it relates to reading and writing. The site also offers lots of embedded course materials, visuals, and videos. Though originally geared towards K-12 teachers, other educators, researchers, and adult learners who want to learn more about current issues in education, students-especially those considering careers in education, psychology, neuroscience, and/or the biological sciences-might find this course useful.

There's new reason to believe so-called "digital natives" really do think differently in response to technology: It may be "priming" them to think more concretely and remember details-rather than the big picture-when they work on a screen. Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem, found a series of experiments detailed in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information," wrote researchers Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth College and Geoff Kaufman of Carnegie Mellon University.

With the spread of mobile technology, it's become much easier for more people to maintain constant contact with their social networks online. And a lot of people are taking advantage of that opportunity. One indication: A recent Pew Research survey of adults in the U.S.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

Children learn language and literacy skills best during powerful, high-quality conversations with the important adults in their lives. Learn what the ingredients of a powerful conversation are, and get specific tips for what you can do during these conversations to build the important skills your child needs to learn.