A peek into language acquisition: Under the scientific microscope
Children seem to learn language almost effortlessly. This can appear in stark contrast to the struggles we, adults, face when learning a second language. Even more impressively, children are learning their native language or languages without access to an answer sheet: there is no dictionary…
Imagine a robot reading a sentence word by word: The. Owl. Sleeps. On. The. Tree.Now try reading the sentence silently: The owl sleeps on the tree. You may have almost heard yourself saying it in your head. It may seem that we read word after word monotonously,…
There are many ways to ask a question. Imagine asking if a friend is coming to a party on the weekend. You may say: (1) Is Jane coming to the party? Or you could say: (2) Jane is coming to the party? In both cases,…
When you show your friends a picture on your phone or point to a drink on a menu to a restaurant server, you are sharing your focus of attention with other people. ‘Joint attention’ is when two or more people are able to focus their…
You remember the lists of word translations you had to memorize for each unit in your school’s second language class. Chat means cat. Chien means dog. Souris means mouse… Lists so long they would lull you to sleep.A lot of second language teaching is about…
Some languages may sound quite similar to an adult. A native speaker of Italian for example may be able to make out some words in Spanish. Other languages may sound very different to an adult. A native Italian speaker may be completely lost as to…
There is a lot of talk about children’s screen time and possible effects on development. Many countries even publish time limit guidelines. At Kotoboo, we have already written a handful of posts on it (click here to check out our posts on screen time and…
There are over 6000 languages across the world, each different from the next. Yet, children can learn any of these languages, along a similar timeline. Each language has its own words for things. A child learning Japanese will have to learn that ‘niwatori’ refers to…
Caregivers can feel a lot of pressure to give their child a head start learning language, or any skill. With a whole market dedicated to ‘the earliest educational experiences’, it can seem enticing to start even before a baby is born: in the womb. That…
At first glance, it can seem that one of the biggest challenges for learning language is figuring out what each word means. For example, learning that ‘dog’ means any furry animal that barks. We often overlook the challenge of first figuring out that when someone…