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Most parents try hard to protect their children from hearing swear words, and children are often punished or reprimanded when they use profane language. The federal government seeks to protect children from hearing swear words through censoring of language in TV shows (particularly during the "family hours").

Dana Suskind, a University of Chicago pediatric otolaryngologist, states our exposure to rich language in the first three years of our lives is critical not just for our ability to pronounce long words but for our overall development and success. The 4 Ts are key points for parents and caretakers of small children: 1. Tune in: be interested in what your child is interested in 2. Talk more: talking more, using richer language, narrating your child's day. 3. Take turns: viewing your child as a conversational partner from day one. Babies are born to learn. 4. Turn off the technology: there is no substitute for real live human interaction.

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."

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.

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

A community-based program in Providence, Rhode Island aims to reverse the verbal achievement gap between affluent and low-income families. On average, by the time they are 3 years old, children in professional families have heard about 30 million more words than children from lower-income households. Through a yearlong series of home visits, Providence Talks aims to coach low-income parents to speak more, and differently, to their children.

Science writer Virginia Morell, in her wonderful new book Animal Wise, describes an experiment involving horses and whinnies - whinnies being very like names. She also cites the research of ornithologist Karl Berg, who states that while most people might think, 'Well, all those [bird] calls are just noise, but I think they're having conversations." Berg has listened to so many parrots in so many nests for so long, he has been able to identify that weeks after birth, these little birds begin to use very specific peeps to identify themselves to others. Not only that, they learn the peeping "names" of their parents, brothers, sisters, and use them in conversation, as in, "Peep-duh-dee-Peep, is that you?" Apparently, dolphins also use particular clicks and whistles to designate particular individuals.

Texting can mold a child or teenager's brain negatively.

Just in time to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, a comprehensive listing of lucky foods to eat for Chinese New Year. Generally, these foods fall into two categories: they either physically resemble lucky objects (e.g. dumplings look like gold ingots, carrot rounds look like coins) or are homophonic with auspicious phrases (e.g. "ye zi"= coconut, sounds like the words for "father/son", conveying the idea of harmonious parent-child relations). Food for thought.

For decades, psychologists cautioned against raising children bilingual. They warned parents and teachers that learning a second language as a child was bad for brain development. But recent studies have found exactly the opposite. Researchers now believe that when people learn another language, they develop cognitive advantages that improve their attention, self-control and ability to deal with conflicting information.

Raising bilingual children is actually good for them. They develop a better ability to concentrate and deal with conflicting information. This could indicate that nurturing a child's brain can increase their language capabilities.

It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school. Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

Study shows that traditional toys and books should be used more for early language development whereas play with electronic toys should be discouraged.Transforming dinosaur, learning bug, talking farm or baby cellphones - these are some of the most whiz-bang toys most parents would think to buy for their kids this Christmas.

What does recent research say about the potential benefits of bilingual education? Here are the main 6 findings: 1. Attention: "[Bilinguals] can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another," says Sorace. Do these same advantages accrue to a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don't yet know. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth, even when they didn't begin practicing a second language in earnest before late childhood. 2. Empathy: bilingual children as young as age 3, because they must follow social cues to figure out which language to use with which person and in what setting, have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind - both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills. 3. Reading (English): students enrolled in dual-language programs outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year's worth of learning by the end of middle school. 4. School performance and engagement: compared with students in English-only classrooms or in one-way immersion, dual-language students have somewhat higher test scores and also seem to be happier in school. Attendance is better, behavioral problems fewer, parent involvement higher. 5. Diversity and integration: Because dual-language schools are composed of native English speakers deliberately placed together with recent immigrants, they tend to be more ethnically and socioeconomically balanced. And there is some evidence that this helps kids of all backgrounds gain comfort with diversity and different cultures. 6. Protection against cognitive decline and dementia: actively using two languages seems to have a protective effect against age-related demen

Positive words from coaches and parents to their kids play a crucial role in the development of the child. Youth sports is about the development of the players. Most coaches often forget this and only focus on the win. This can result in yelling at the players and overall very negative language use. However, being "relentlessly positive" can improve the attitude and play of an athlete.

Chisato Danjo, Lecturer in Japanese and Linguistics at York St John University, reports on her ethnographic case study examining a mother and her two bilingual Japanese-English children. Danjo argues that instead of seeing bilingualism as "dual monolingualism," as reflected in the practice of "One Parent, One Language" (OPOL), we adopt a broader view of language learning: translanguaging, which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world. When we see a child actively using, adapting and negotiating their repertoire, it casts doubt on the belief that it's bad for children to mix languages. What it could actually be doing is demonstrating high-level flexibility and interpersonal skills.

This article is about how a child's first language can include more than just words. According to UNESCO, "Mother tongue or mother language refers to a child's first language, the language learned in the home from older family members." A child's language should be allowed and encouraged to be multilingual if their culture has a different language. There is more to a child's first language than just words because it also includes cultural and ancestral history that should and can be passed on to future generations. But since in some households parents don't encourage their children to learn their cultural language many children are losing out on this.

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.

Hawaii put forward a plan Tuesday, 1/17/2023, to make preschool available to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032, which if successful would put the state in a rarified group of states managing to provide pre-kindergarten education to most of its children. Hawaii's leaders have aspired to universal pre-K for decades but have found it elusive. A recent analysis found the state was moving so slowly toward that goal that it would take 47 years to build all the public preschool capacity Hawaii needed. The state expects it will need 465 new classrooms to serve the additional students. Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who has been tasked by Gov. Josh Green to lead the state's efforts, said only half of Hawaii's 35,000 3- and 4-year-olds attend preschool, either by paying expensive tuition for private schools or obtaining one of the few spots in publicly-funded pre-K programs. The state estimates there are about 9,200 children whose parents want to send them to preschool but aren't able. It's targeting its plans at this group.

This article talks about general language disorders, how to detect impairments, options for treatment, and much more. More specifically, one portion of the article focuses on receptive versus expressive forms of language, and the characteristics that fall beneath each of these categories. Lastly, the article addresses how parents can help their child succeed from a young age.

When a human baby is born, its first cry is a normal sign of good health. Having never taken a breath before, the baby signals its first inhalation and exhalation-in the form of a screech. How do babies know to create a sound they've never made before? And is their first yelp truly the start of speech development? As it turns out, human babies may be practicing how to cry long before they ever make a sound. That is, if they're anything like marmosets, humans' primate cousins. A study of marmosets by Daniel Takahashi, a co-author of the study and an animal behaviorist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. shows fetal monkeys practicing crying in the womb. Takahashi notes, "marmosets are monkeys that we know vocalize a lot, and they share a lot of features with humans." For instance, both male and female parents raise their offspring together, and unlike other primates, marmoset babies are relatively helpless when they're born, like human infants. Takahashi says the central finding will help illuminate when speech development begins, and that studying pre-birth-rather than the moment of birth-may help identify speech or motor development problems earlier. "There are a lot of things going on in the womb that might be relevant to what's going on afterwards," he says.