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Outlines the importance of early children's language development. It highlights the importance of the four main components to early language development: Phonology, Semantics, Grammar and Pragmatics. This article shows the critical period of first 5 years in development as this is the time that baby's nerve connections are being made and those for speech/communication need to be built early on so that they're inherent to learning.

Its amazing how similar language and music are to each other. Language and music both require rhythm; otherwise they don't make any sense. This article explores whether early exposure to music can help babies acquire their first language.

Very informational article about music and the correlation with childhood development. "Music is a way of knowing." Music must be included in early childhood to ensure a comprehensive learning experience. 

Linguist Victor Mair references Caleb Madison's article in the "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22): "Why We're All Shooketh: The term is online slang of Biblical proportions". The phrase I'm shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang. In the original article, Madison noted that when we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in "I'm shaking." The past participle would be "I'm shaken." But in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. As for the "eth" part, Mair notes that this suffix was used in Early Modern English (think Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to put verbs in the third-person present tense, e.g. "she loveth." Soon, -eth simplified to just -s, but we still use the form when we need to give our verbs a little extra ancient oomph. It just wouldn't be as momentous to say "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away!" And it certainly wouldn't be as cool to say "I'm shooks." But our distance from the Elizabethan era allows -eth to reappear with no tense tension. Instead, it simply adds a wry dramatic flourish to the feeling of being shook. If using shook dials the shock of shaken up a notch, adding -eth pushes the intensity to 11, expressing a holy and almost sublime desire in the face of inexplicable events. Shooketh yokes together a punchy modern verbal innovation with a dramatic formal relic of early English to communicate a shaking of biblical propor

From a charred Hebrew scroll, researchers resurrected one of the earliest known versions of the Old Testament using a new digital reconstruction technique that may prove invaluable in revealing words from other previously unreadable finds, said scientists who plan to make the imaging software freely available.

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, University of Washington researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas - the hippocampus and cerebellum - can predict children's language abilities at one year of age. Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1, as measured by babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and ability to produce different types of sounds. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor. "Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn't the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing," Kuhl said. "Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents." The findings could reflect infants' abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind. "The brain uses many general skills to learn language," Kuhl said. "Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path."

Without understanding the 'referential function' of language (words as 'verbal labels', symbolizing other things) it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present early in infants? Marno, Nespor, and Mehler of the International School of Advanced Studies conducted experiments with infants (4 months old). Babies watched a series of videos where a person might (or might not) utter an (invented) name of an object, while directing (or not directing) their gaze towards the position on the screen where a picture of the object would appear. By monitoring the infants' gaze, Marno and colleagues observed that, in response to speech cues, the infant's gaze would look faster for the visual object, indicating that she is ready to find a potential referent of the speech. However, this effect did not occur if the person in the video remained silent or if the sound was a non-speech sound. "The mere fact of hearing verbal stimuli placed the infants in a condition to expect the appearance, somewhere, of an object to be associated with the word, whereas this didn't happen when there was no speech, even when the person in the video directed the infant's gaze to where the object would appear, concludes Marno. "This suggests that infants at this early age already have some knowledge that language implies a relation between words and the surrounding physical world. Moreover, they are also ready to find out these relations, even if they don't know anything about the meanings of the words yet. Thus, a good advice to mothers is to speak to their infants, because infants might understand much more than they would show, and in this way their attention can be efficiently guided by their caregivers."

Description of words, syntax, etc.

"According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, [the American style] was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order 'to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space).'" Ironically, though, this article only uses the "logical punctuation" style once - in the title.

I love it when punctuation marks fit neatly within the quotation. The opposite makes me feel strangely queasy...

great side-by-side comparisons of old, middle, early modern prodigal son story, both text and audio

This article explores the affects of high social interaction from a young age on 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."

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."

Musical training improves the brain's ability to discern the components of sound - the pitch, the timing and the timbre. "To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections," said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument."

This seminal longitudinal study, conducted by Goodwyn, Acredolo and Brown (2000), evaluated the benefits of purposefully encouraging hearing infants to use simple gestures as symbols for objects, requests, and conditions. Researchers measured the receptive and expressive language abilities of 103 babies via standardized language tests at the age of 11, 15, 19, 24, 30, and 36 months. Their findings suggest that symbolic gesturing does not hamper children's early verbal development, and may even facilitate it. The possible reasons underlying the results: increases in infant-directed speech, infant-selected topic selection, and scaffolding that encourages communication.

This study followed 1,000 people and compared their test results as children vs. at age 50. The kids who could name objects/animals in pictures, form a sentence, and share experiences more quickly than other children tended to show higher IQ's later on in life.

Nice overview of the neurological and other benefits conferred by bilingualism. Being fluent in two languages, particularly from early childhood, not only enhances a person's ability to concentrate, but might also protect against the onset of dementia and other age-related cognitive decline. More recently, scientists have discovered that bilingual adults have denser gray matter (brain tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers), especially in the brain's left hemisphere, where most language and communication skills are controlled. The effect is strongest in people who learned a second language before the age of five and in those who are most proficient at their second language. This finding suggests that being bilingual from an early age significantly alters the brain's structure.

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.