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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.

Toys R Us routinely sues any companies who attempt to trademark "R Us" as part of their name.

Wordles of commonly used words in television commercials advertising boy and girl toys.

McDonald's swears up and down that the little yellow "Minions" Happy Meal toy is speaking only nonsense words and not something a little more adult. Experts say the company may be right, and the curse words many hear may be tied to how our brains are primed to find words even when they're not really there. "The brain tries to find a pattern match, even when just receiving noise, and it is good at pattern recognition," says Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at the Yale School of Medicine. "Once the brain feels it has found a best match, then that is what you hear. The clarity of the speech actually increases with multiple exposures, or if you are primed by being told what to listen for" - as most people who heard the toy online already had been. The technical name for the phenomenon is "pareidolia," hearing sounds or seeing images that seem meaningful but are actually random. It leads people to see shapes in clouds, a man in the moon or the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich.

"...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. ... Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country's National Encyclopedia. ... critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children ... toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do ... One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys 'gender-coded' them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys."

Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, a recent study says. U.S. researchers compared 9-month-old babies who played with toys and trucks to those who practiced banging out a rhythm during a series of play sessions.

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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."

This is an interesting article that explains the weird linguistic phenomena in which people are able to read a sentence where the letters in each word are jumbled up. Although scientists haven't came up with an exact conclusion for this amazing human capability, this article provides a few theories.

Our human brains are naturally pattern-seeking, hence we attempt to make sense of gibberish, a phenomenon known as pareidolia. Pareidolia is also the same reason why we see shapes in clouds, hear Satanic msgs. in music played backwards, think Minion Happy Meal toys are spouting obscenities, and understand the vocal substitutions made by ventriloquists.

An unreleased study tracked infants', a group with autistic older siblings and another without, gaze when shown a video of an adult speaking while surrounded by toys. The two groups had similar times in watching the screen and mouth and face of the actor as a whole. But it was shown that the younger siblings may not internalize the linguistic clues that help babies learn language.