Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This is about the "Mozart effect" and if it does indeed help babies become more intelligent by listening to classical music at a young age.

This BBC article notes how media totally misconstrued the modest results reported by the original UC Irvine study, which found that students who listened to Mozart did better at tasks where they had to create shapes in their minds. These students had stronger performance on spatial tasks: specifically, looking at folded up pieces of paper with cuts in them and predicting: how they would appear when unfolded. This effect, however, was sadly temporary: about fifteen minutes. A subsequent meta-analysis of sixteen different studies confirmed that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to manipulate shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn't make us more intelligent. In 2010 a larger meta-analysis of a greater number of studies again found a positive effect, but that other kinds of music worked just as well, provided that listeners enjoyed what they were listening to. The article concludes that what's crucial in performance is "cognitive arousal": getting your brain more alert, whether it's through music, a Starbucks frappacino, or shooting hoops.

This seminal longitudinal study, conducted by Goodwyn, Acredolo and Brown (2000), evaluated the benefits of purposefully encouraging hearing infants to use simple gestures as symbols for objects, requests, and conditions. Researchers measured the receptive and expressive language abilities of 103 babies via standardized language tests at the age of 11, 15, 19, 24, 30, and 36 months. Their findings suggest that symbolic gesturing does not hamper children's early verbal development, and may even facilitate it. The possible reasons underlying the results: increases in infant-directed speech, infant-selected topic selection, and scaffolding that encourages communication.

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

This article essentially describes how research has shown that 18-24 months of age is the prime time to help their verbal communication skills in later years.

This article explains that learning language actually starts in the womb, not after birth. With new technology, researchers from the University of Kansas were able to track in-utero babies' responses to American and Japanese. As the mothers had only spoken English during their pregnancies, Japanese was a completely new language to the fetuses. The fetuses reacted very differently to the Japanese than they did to the American, which suggests that fetuses are able to start learning language before they are even brought into the world.

Word "edges" are important for language acquisition. Children start to learn the sound of words by remembering the first and last syllables. A new study sheds light on the information the infant brain uses during language acquisition and the format in which it stores words in its memory. Infants start to learn words very early, during the first months of life, and to do so they have to memorise their sounds and associate them with meanings. The study by Silvia Benavides-Varela (now at the IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo in Venice, but at SISSA at the time the study was performed) and Jacques Mehler, neuroscientist at SISSA, revealed the format in which infants remember their first words. In particular, the two scientists saw that infants aged about seven months accurately encode the sound and position of the first and last syllable, whereas they have difficulty retaining the order of syllables in the middle.

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

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

This topic is really similar to what we discussed in class about babble and how almost all languages worldwide share a similar way of talking to their babies. This article talks about how different settlements could have communicated with each other without learning each other's language. They did this by studying "vocal charades," which were vocal noises that could be attributed to different actions. For example snoring noises meant "sleep."

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.

This article discusses the generational divide of the English language and teaches us the connection to how language can change over time.

This is about how telehealth is being used during this pandemic, and the complications with expressing people's thoughts over video chat

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 how children grasp language especially in correlation to physical objects. Further, the article mentions how a study conducted show children's own experience helps them learn new words. Interestingly when parents point out an object the child must attempt to find the object, whereas when children are holding the object the connection between the world is easier.

This source talks about different experiments done on toddlers who were bilingual and not. The underlying findings: - Being bilingual doesn't confuse children, they are able to understand that the languages are separate. - Being bilingual actually has longterm effects (especially with cognitive development).