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Word "edges" are important for language acquisition. Children start to learn the sound of words by remembering the first and last syllables. A new study sheds light on the information the infant brain uses during language acquisition and the format in which it stores words in its memory. Infants start to learn words very early, during the first months of life, and to do so they have to memorise their sounds and associate them with meanings. The study by Silvia Benavides-Varela (now at the IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo in Venice, but at SISSA at the time the study was performed) and Jacques Mehler, neuroscientist at SISSA, revealed the format in which infants remember their first words. In particular, the two scientists saw that infants aged about seven months accurately encode the sound and position of the first and last syllable, whereas they have difficulty retaining the order of syllables in the middle.

The age at which children learn a second language can have a significant bearing on the structure of their adult brain, according to a new joint study by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro at McGill University and Oxford University. The study concludes that the pattern of brain development is similar if you learn one or two language from birth. However, learning a second language later on in childhood after gaining proficiency in the first (native) language does in fact modify the brain's structure, specifically the brain's inferior frontal cortex. The left inferior frontal cortex became thicker and the right inferior frontal cortex became thinner. The cortex is a multi-layered mass of neurons that plays a major role in cognitive functions such as thought, language, consciousness and memory. The study suggests that the task of acquiring a second language after infancy stimulates new neural growth and connections among neurons in ways seen in acquiring complex motor skills such as juggling. The study's authors speculate that the difficulty that some people have in learning a second language later in life could be explained at the structural level.

This article discusses how numbers are not innately known and must be taught, thus as such our language and "defining" them cannot be exact. Through research and monitoring children as well as isolated people like the Piraha, one see's it is difficult to differenciate numbers such as 4 and 5 and 7. While telling the difference between big and small or 1 and 2 are easy.

Numbers are tools people invented a long time ago, and we know how to use them only because we find ourselves in a society in which that knowledge has been preserved and transmitted. Without these symbols, we, like the Pirahã, could not "see" divisions between most quantities. Anthropologist Caleb Everett asserts that when our ancestors learned to count, they "radically transformed the human condition," making possible such number-dependent developments as complex agriculture.

This article discusses the impact that social media has on youth. Because most modern teens are learning to do the majority of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person, they are missing out on the extremely critical social skills required for social situations. When you replace face-to-face interactions with screen-to-screen interactions, children do not learn the social cues such as body language, facial expression, and vocal reactions. The article discusses indirect communications, how to lower the risks of your child having bad social skills, how cyberbullying and the imposter syndrome affect teenagers, how stalking other people accounts can lower their self-esteem, and what parents can do to help. Experts worry that because social media and text messages have become so integral to teenage life, they are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

Eye contact plays a bigger role in communication than previously thought. Our pupils, which we cannot control, expands or contracts based on the attractiveness of what we're looking at. Blinking speed can also tell us something. You blink faster when talking to someone you find attractive. Too much constant eye contact can make people feel uncomfortable. A reason why children are often victims of pet attacks is that they stare too long at the animal and the animal feels threatened. The best use of eye contact is regular intervals rather than constant eye contact.

According to two new World Health Organization reports, about 1.7 million children under the age of 5 die each year because of environmental hazards. It's the first such estimate of the child death toll from environmental causes.

"Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase "yeah, right" was used, it was uttered sarcastically. ... The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a "theory of mind" to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different ... Kids pick up the ability to detect sarcasm at a young age. ... There appear to be regional variations in sarcasm. ... Many parts of the brain are involved in processing sarcasm, according to recent brain imaging studies."

Sarcasm is an important aspect of society that seems to develop a person's brain as well. "Exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving" and it "exercises the brain more than sincere statements do." So the extra work it takes to understand sarcasm actually does work out our brains. Apparently sarcasm has been a way to show you belong and almost have a superior quality to those around you. Very interesting!

Sound symbolism is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between word and meaning. Although a number of behavioral studies demonstrate that both children and adults are universally sensitive to sound symbolism in mimetic words, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not yet been extensively investigated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how Japanese mimetic words are processed in the brain. In Experiment 1, we compared processing for motion mimetic words with that for non-sound symbolic motion verbs and adverbs. Mimetic words uniquely activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). In Experiment 2, we further examined the generalizability of the findings from Experiment 1 by testing another domain: shape mimetics. Our results show that the right posterior STS was active when subjects processed both motion and shape mimetic words, thus suggesting that this area may be the primary structure for processing sound symbolism. Increased activity in the right posterior STS may also reflect how sound symbolic words function as both linguistic and non-linguistic iconic symbols.

The LENA System measures the early language environment of children birth to 48 months. It consists of a compact digital recorder with clothing so a child can wear it comfortably; software that turns the recording into data; and a cloud-based system for managing the data. Feedback from LENA helps parents and caregivers increase the quantity and quality of interactive talk. While words are important, "conversational turns" are even more so - times when an adult says something and the child responds, or vice versa. Turns measure interactions, and according to research, they're a very powerful predictor of brain growth. LENA devices were mentioned in "In the Beginning Was the Word" article from _The Economist_.

This article explains the reason why we call our parents mom and dad. The article gives examples of different ways to say mom and dad in different languages in a table, to show how similar the sounds of mom and dad are across those languages. The article then explained how social constructs and culture keeps us from calling our mom or dad their legal name.

This article discusses why children call their parents 'Mom' and 'Dad', and why not other names. It talks about how the role sounds play, and the role that cultural rules play in why most people refer their parents in this way.

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.

Across the workld, girls routinely outstrip boys at reading. In two of the largest studies ever conducted into the reading habits of children in the United Kingdom, Keith Topping-a professor of educational and social research at Scotland's University of Dundee-found that boys dedicate less time than girls to processing words, that they're more prone to skipping passages or entire sections, and that they frequently choose books that are beneath their reading levels. "Girls tend to do almost everything more thoroughly than boys," Topping told me over email, while conversely boys are "more careless about some, if not most, school subjects." And notably, as countless studies have shown, girls are also more likely to read for pleasure. The literacy gap also produces disparities in educational achievement overall. The disparity, researchers believe, is not rooted in biology, as the brain is a unisex organ; most gender differences are mostly a result of socialization. Boys tend to be more vulnerable than girls to peer pressure, and that could discourage them from activities like reading that are perceived to be "uncool." David Reilly, a psychologist, points to the stereotype that liking and excelling at reading is a feminine trait. He suggested that psychological factors-like girls' tendency to develop self-awareness and relationship skills earlier in life than boys-could play a role in the disparity, too, while also explaining why boys often struggle to cultivate a love of reading. "Give boys the right literature, that appeals to their tastes and interests, and you can quickly see changes in reading attitudes," he says, citing comic books as an example.

This article includes new information about how the coronavirus lockdowns have negatively impacted children's speech and language skills. It has small anecdotes of real families with young children where their language progress was practically stalled during the lockdowns but able to bounce back through rigorous language assistance schools. It even touches on how by adulthood, "four times more likely to struggle with reading, three time more likely to have mental health issues, twice as likely to be unemployed and have social-mobility issues, " if someone has issues with language in childhood.

A spoken language is more than just words and sounds. Speakers use changes in pitch and rhythm, known as prosody, to provide emphasis, show emotion, and otherwise add meaning to what they say. But a language does not need to be spoken to have prosody: sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), use movements, pauses and facial expressions to achieve the same goals. In a study appearing in the September 2015 issue of Language, three linguists look at intonation (a key part of prosody) in ASL and find that native ASL signers learn intonation in much the same way that users of spoken languages do. Children learning ASL acquired prosodic features in three stages of "appearance, reorganization, and mastery": accurately replicating their use in simpler contexts, attempting unsuccessfully at first to use them in more challenging contexts, then using them accurately in all contexts as they fully learn the rules of prosody. Previous research has shown that native learners of spoken languages acquire intonation following a similar pattern.

In this TED-Talk, Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez, linguistics professor at the University of Washington and a specialist in the brain processes of children 0-3 years, lays out the benefits of bilingualism, tells how to optimize language learning to achieve better acquisition, and dispels some common concerns about the cons of creating a bilingual child. No surprises here: start early, and create conditions where babies are exposed to the desired target languages-this will enable babies to process the sounds of dual languages, not just one. Ideally, babies will have frequent, social interactions with fully-competent, fluent speakers of the target languages. Ramirez also mentions a major cognitive benefit to bilingualism: a strengthened prefrontal cortex: the area of the brain that deals with task-switching and flexible thinking.

Northwestern University researchers, led by Dr Nina Kraus, found that poor readers had reduced neural response (auditory brainstem activity) to rhythmic rather than random sounds compared to good readers. In fact the level of neural enhancement to acoustic regularities correlated with reading ability as well as musical aptitude. The musical ability test, specifically the rhythm aspect, was also related to reading ability. Similarly a good score on the auditory working memory related to better reading and to the rhythm aspect of musical ability. Dr Kraus explained, "Both musical ability and literacy correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brainstem. Structural equation modeling of the data revealed that music skill, together with how the nervous system responds to regularities in auditory input and auditory memory/attention accounts for about 40% of the difference in reading ability between children. These results add weight to the argument that music and reading are related via common neural and cognitive mechanisms and suggests a mechanism for the improvements in literacy seen with musical training."

This article talks about why it is impossible to study a sentence and look at the physical structure of the letters without reading or comprehending the sentence meaning. It references the Stroop Effect, which is a cognitive interference where there is a delay in the reaction time of a certain task occurs due to a stimuli conflicting. So when people are told to read a set of words such as "orange, purple, green, blue, yellow", but the color of these words are not that of what they read, people usually stumble as they read. It was interesting because when we are children, it was the opposite, but once we learn the skill to read, it becomes irreversible.

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.

I like this article because it also has a statistics at the bottom representing the influence of texts on primary school kids

This was a fascinating article that focused on one dying language in particular - Icelandic. The article details of how Icelandic is weakening to the point that some of Iceland's youngest children speak English without an Icelandic accent, and when speaking Icelandic, their syntax is unfortunately influenced by English. Further, the article detailed of how the Icelandic government aims to secure a future for this language, spoken by less than 400,000 people, through preserving it in a digital medium on an online database.