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The LENA System measures the early language environment of children birth to 48 months. It consists of a compact digital recorder with clothing so a child can wear it comfortably; software that turns the recording into data; and a cloud-based system for managing the data. Feedback from LENA helps parents and caregivers increase the quantity and quality of interactive talk. While words are important, "conversational turns" are even more so - times when an adult says something and the child responds, or vice versa. Turns measure interactions, and according to research, they're a very powerful predictor of brain growth. LENA devices were mentioned in "In the Beginning Was the Word" article from _The Economist_.

The extra information provided in music can facilitate language learning. The researchers of this study also suggest that other information, like gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language. In addition, there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Language and music are both associated with emotions. And of course, we know that children - especially small children - really like music. This study offers another bit of evidence that the link between language and music may be a fundamental one.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

A 2013 joint study, conducted by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro at McGill University and Oxford University, concludes that the pattern of brain development is similar if you learn one or two languages from birth. However, learning a second language later on in childhood, after gaining proficiency in the first (native) language, does in fact, modify the brain's structure, specifically the brain's inferior frontal cortex. The left inferior frontal cortex became thicker and the right inferior frontal cortex became thinner. The cortex is a multi-layered mass of neurons that plays a major role in cognitive functions such as thought, language, consciousness and memory. The study suggests that the task of acquiring a second language after infancy stimulates new neural growth and connections among neurons in ways seen in acquiring complex motor skills such as juggling. The study's authors speculate that the difficulty that some people have in learning a second language later in life could be explained at the structural level. "The later in childhood that the second language is acquired, the greater are the changes in the inferior frontal cortex," said Dr. Denise Klein, researcher in The Neuro's Cognitive Neuroscience Unit and a lead author on the paper published in the journal Brain and Language. "Our results provide structural evidence that age of acquisition is crucial in laying down the structure for language learning."

This study looks at the advancement in technology in China and how it has impacted children and their language skills. Chinese children have learned to use pinyin input on electronic devices, which is typing in what a character sounds like, without having to actually write it out. Use of pinyin input and other e-tools are negatively impacting character recognition skills and Chinese reading acquisition, while handwriting works oppositely.

In this TED-Talk, Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez, linguistics professor at the University of Washington and a specialist in the brain processes of children 0-3 years, lays out the benefits of bilingualism, tells how to optimize language learning to achieve better acquisition, and dispels some common concerns about the cons of creating a bilingual child. No surprises here: start early, and create conditions where babies are exposed to the desired target languages-this will enable babies to process the sounds of dual languages, not just one. Ideally, babies will have frequent, social interactions with fully-competent, fluent speakers of the target languages. Ramirez also mentions a major cognitive benefit to bilingualism: a strengthened prefrontal cortex: the area of the brain that deals with task-switching and flexible thinking.

Scientists from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) together with colleagues from the University of Helsinki have discovered that learning foreign languages enhances the our brain's elasticity and its ability to code information. The more foreign languages we learn, the more effectively our brain reacts and processes the data accumulated in the course of learning.

This article shows new evidence which suggests that language is learned in circuits that are used for many other purposes, instead of the common claim that language acquisition occurs in a specific part of the brain dedicated to the purpose. How good we are at remembering vocabulary relates to how good we are at declarative memory, which is used to remember shopping lists or people's faces. Grammar in children, on the other hand, correlates most strongly to procedural memory which is used for driving or playing an instrument.

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.

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

This article talks about how sleep plays an active role in language and brain development and the role it plays in early language acquisition.

This article discusses the different theories on what influences language development: Nature or Nurture? Is language bound to develop from genetics, or is language dependent on environment?

Cartoonist LA Johnson employs a graphic novel-style approach to a story about a dual-language school: Bruce-Monroe Elementary School in Washington, D.C. In a dual-language classroom, sometimes you're the student and sometimes you're the teacher. Here's what it's like for 6-year-old Merari, an L1=Spanish ELL (English Language Learner).

The critical period hypothesis is one of the reasons that some adults are hesitant to take on learning their heritage language. The theory essentially argues that there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic, somewhere between the age of 2 and puberty. This theory has entered our popular consciousness as a rule that you can't learn a second-language fluently when you're older. However, scientists disagree with this notion because although it will take more conscious effort, it is still possible to become fluent in another language past the "critical window." Specifically, second language acquisition becomes more difficult with age because it requires rewiring your brain to break certain habits that relate to language learning. For example, pronunciation and accent requires breaking habits related to the way you move your mouth to speak, making it more difficult to have native-level pronunciation as you grow older. Beyond neuroscience, though, research has shown that other factors, such as exposure and education influence language learning.

Although a densely academic article, Professor Patrick Heinrich of the University of Venice, discusses the history of colonization in Okinawa and its detrimental effect on the indigenous languages of the region. The Ryūkyūans are a group of indigenous peoples living in the Ryūkyū archipelago, which stretches southwest of the main Japanese island of Kyūshū towards Taiwan. The largest and most populated island of the archipelago, Okinawa Island, is actually closer to Manila, Taipei, Shanghai and Seoul than it is to Tokyo. Though considered by the Japanese as speaking a dialect, the Ryūkyūans speak separate languages such as Okinawan, also known as Uchinaguchi, as well as Amami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. All are part of the Japonic language family, to which the Japanese language also belongs, and all are recognized as endangered languages by UNESCO. Language reclamation in the contemporary Ryukyus departs from a keen awareness that language loss is bigger than language itself. Activists know that losing a language entails the loss of an entire world of symbolic representations, and therefore, of how to place oneself in the world. Concepts of self, society, and place change when one language is replaced by another (Guay 2023). Language loss is no trivial loss. Language loss and the sociocultural displacement accompanying it are responsible for many problems in endangered speech communities worldwide, including those in Japan. Endangered language communities like the Ryukyuans and the Ainu are more likely than the majority Japanese to suffer from prejudice, poverty, spiritual disconnectedness from their heritage culture, family instability, or difficulties to climb the social ladder (see Onai 2011). Language loss also causes a weakening of cultural autonomy. It becomes more difficult to support the community's self-image if majority languages are adopted (Heinrich and Ishihara 2018). Language reclamation addresses these problems and in so doing contribut

This seminal paper by Dr. Jean Berko Gleason introduces the Wug Test, a unique way to study childhood language acquisition by asking young children to pluralize nonsense words, put them past tense, and more.