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In a MIT study, they had a group of children take piano lessons, reading lessons, or no lessons. The kids who took piano lessons were better able to distinguish between different pitches, which therefore improved their ability to discriminate between spoken words.

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.

As Christmas draws near, I often find myself pondering with disappointment during the holiday season as to why our Western civilization continues to poison kids with the belief that Santa Claus exists as an actual, mystical individual. What are your takes on instilling this tradition as current or future parents? Do you believe that it's morally sane or unjustified that most parents are untruthful to their children for the sake of imagination and creativity? Does this issue do more harm than good for a child or vice versa? As a child, did you feel that the telling of the truth was of a great disturbance to you? Please feel free to comment on this post as it will help everyone in the Words R Us community know your thoughts and stances, as well as the pros and cons to this controversial issue.

The correlation of foreign accents with "bad" characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States. The most wicked foreign accent of all was British English, according to the study. From Scar to Aladdin's Jafar, the study found that British is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. German and Slavic accents are also common for villain voices. Henchmen or assistants to villains often spoke in dialects associated with low socioeconomic status, including working-class Eastern European dialects or regional American dialects such as "Italian-American gangster" (like when Claude in Captain Planet says 'tuh-raining' instead of 'training.') None of the villains in the sample studied seemed to speak Standard American English; when they did speak with an American accent, it was always in regional dialects associated with low socioeconomic status.

Though smartphones seem ubiquitous in daily life, they are actually so new that researchers are just beginning to understand what the devices may do to the brain. Researchers say phones and social media not only serve a primitive need for connection but can also create powerful feedback loops. "People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump, and kids have basically been carrying it around for the last 10 years," said David Greenfield, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and founder of The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction.

This article addresses many parents' concerns of their kids listening to rap music. Questions that are answered in this article are questions like does rap promote violence or influence sexual behavior amongst teens. The conclusion was that rap is an art form used to express many emotions. Like all art and everything else in life, there is the good and the bad. Rap can promote violence and talk about it or it can condemn violence and propose solutions to them. The article seemed to suggest that what influenced teens actions more than rap lyrics was the social and economic factors of where the teen is growing up.

This article focuses on the negatives of texting. It talks about how kids use abbreviations, such as "OMG", and how this is preventing them from being properly educated.

"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!

Scientists are reporting in the journal Science that they have identified specialized brain cells that help us understand what a speaker really means. These cells do this by keeping track of changes in the pitch of the voice. "We found that there were groups of neurons that were specialized and dedicated just for the processing of pitch," says Dr. Eddie Chang, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. Chang says these neurons allow the brain to detect "the melody of speech," or intonation, while other specialized brain cells identify vowels and consonants. "Intonation is about how we say things," Chang says. "It's important because we can change the meaning, even - without actually changing the words themselves." The identification of specialized cells that track intonation shows just how much importance the human brain assigns to hearing, says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist who runs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Processing sound is one of the most complex jobs that we ask our brain to do," Kraus says. And it's a skill that some brains learn better than others, she says. Apparently, musicians, according to a study conducted by Kraus, are better than non-musicians at recognizing the subtle tonal changes found in Mandarin Chinese. On the other hand, recognizing intonation is a skill that's often impaired in people with autism, Kraus says. "A typically developing child will process those pitch contours very precisely," Kraus says. "But some kids on the autism spectrum don't. They understand the words you are saying, but they are not understanding how you mean it." The new study suggests that may be because the brain cells that usually keep track of pitch aren't working the way they should.

Article talks re: the changing nature of a period. Its original function, to indicate the end of a thought, has become obsolete in texting, because of the ability to "send". Now the period can be used to indicate seriousness or a sense of finality. But caution is needed, said linguist Gretchen McCulloch, noting that problems can start to arise when you combine a period with a positive sentiment, such as "Sure" or "Sounds good." "Now you've got positive words and serious punctuation and the clash between them is what creates that sense of passive-aggression," said McCulloch. Binghamton University psychology professor Celia Klin says a period can inadvertently set a tone, because while text messaging may function like speech, it lacks many of the expressive features of face-to-face verbal communication, like "facial expressions, tone of voice, our ability to elongate words, to say some things louder, to pause." Our language has evolved, and "what we have done with our incredible linguistic genius is found ways to insert that kind of emotional, interpersonal information into texting using what we have," said Klin. "And what we have is things like periods, emoticons, other kinds of punctuation. So people have repurposed the period to mean something else."

This article delves into why swearing isn't in an appropriate part of children's lexicon. It discusses the power that swear words have and the right of passage to adulthood the first time that someone uses them. Swear words also allow people to release their anger. In past generations, swearing was seen as an absolute no no, but nowadays, swearing has become a more acceptable way of expressing one's self. In the future, swearing will probably become a normal part of a child's vocabulary.

This article shows the importance of music therapy practice when focusing on communication skills with a speech pathologist within a pediatric rehabilitation setting. There is a case about a kid named Sam who is an eleven year old boy who sustained a severe garrotting injury. The article goes over how the individual music therapy program helped him to maximize his potential and motivation in achieving his communication goals, while speech pathology provided therapeutic intervention and outcomes while he re-learned his speech skills.

This article talks about how speech and language disorders can occur in a variety of different ways. Sometimes, people's brains have problems figuring out how to make their mouths and tongues move in the proper way to make the sounds they want to make. The article goes over how these children might have problems learning others things as well such as reading. In other cases, some children have speech language disorders because of cerebral palsy which means that the muscles in their bodies do not work as well as they should, making it harder to make your mouth create the right sounds. or, children might be deaf, and unable to hear that they're making wrong sounds. The article states many different reasons why people might have speech and language disorders

This article explains what Braille is: a system of raised dots that can be read with the fingers by people who are blind or who have low vision. Braille is not a language, but rather a code used to represent language in literacy. Braille is often written in 'uncontracted braille,' which is more common in younger kids or newly blind/visual impaired people and included entire words represented in braille, whereas 'contracted braille' is a shortened form that can use just the first and last letters of a word, respectively.

Parents become too intense while watching their children's sports games, and their language (yelling, profanity, etc.) ruins the environment for everyone.

Studies have traced a range of impressive benefits to writing down the things for which we're grateful-benefits including better sleep, fewer symptoms of illness, and more happiness among adults and kids alike. Robert Emmons, a UC Davis professor who studies the science of gratitude, offers the following research-based tips to enhance journaling effectiveness: 1. Don't just go through the motions. Research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and others suggests that journaling is more effective if you first make the conscious decision to become happier and more grateful. "Motivation to become happier plays a role in the efficacy of journaling," says Emmons. 2. Go for depth over breadth. Elaborating in detail about a particular thing for which you're grateful carries more benefits than a superficial list of many things. 3. Get personal. Focusing on people to whom you are grateful has more of an impact than focusing on things for which you are grateful. 4. Try subtraction, not just addition. One effective way of stimulating gratitude is to reflect on what your life would be like without certain blessings, rather than just tallying up all those good things. 5. Savor surprises. Try to record events that were unexpected or surprising, as these tend to elicit stronger levels of gratitude. 6. Don't overdo it. Writing occasionally (once or twice per week) is more beneficial than daily journaling.

Writing down what you're grateful for greatly impacts your social, physical, and physiological health but to some the impacts are unclear. This article page has a link that has created their very own technological gratitude journal that deepens and practices efficient journaling. Included in this article are 6 tips: 1) Have passion behind jotting down your gratitude. It put more motivation and thought in your writings. 2) Be specific with what you're grateful for. 3) Lean towards focusing your gratitude on people rather than things. (You learn to become less materialistic.) 4) Consider mentioning what it would be like with out the blessings. 5) Record events that were surprising & out of the ordinary. 6) Occasional writing over daily writing because it's easy for us to get numb to the good side of life. Writing our thoughts down rather than thinking about them or saying them, deepens our emotional connection and makes us more self aware.

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

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

This article talks about how our brain works while acquiring language and using language. As we grow and out brain grows, different parts of our brain lights up as we age.