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If you want your kids to learn to talk in the best possible way, a new study suggests you should ditch the baby talk and speak to them in normal sentences. The findings suggest that videos that claim to teach toddlers, or flash cards for tots, may not be the best idea.

Al-Sayyid is a village in Israel, populated by congenitally-deaf people. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can. Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind? ABSL offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a "language instinct" that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.

Siblings are an important influence on the language acquisition/learning of other siblings, especially in multilingual households.

Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language. While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages. "Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i

Sociolinguist Gavin Lamb examines how people use language to build social relationships with non-human beings, like dogs. He cites the research of Alexandra Horowitz, a dog-cognition scientist who studied verbal human-dog interaction. Some interesting findings: 1. Humans use dog-directed parentese for attention-getting, positive-affect, using a higher pitch, like we might for babies/toddlers. 2. Talking to dogs serves as a social lubricant for starting up conversations, or diffusing tense situations with other humans. 3. Asking rhetorical, unanswerable questions, e.g. "What's up, buddy?": an example of phatic communication, which is not information-driven, but which helps establish or maintain social relationships. The language serves a socio-pragmatic, rather than denotative function.

This article talks about why children are able to learn languages faster than an adult. It explains why a toddler is able to learn two languages at once while an adult may take years to learn one language. It also talks about how the brain works when a child learns another language.