A peek into language acquisition: Under the scientific microscope
Ask Kotoboo! Complete a short 3-minute questionnaire to help us make our comics better, and at the end you will have the opportunity to ask a question about children’s language development. We will answer a lucky handful of those questions in our comic posts! Some…
Grammar is the glue of language: it allows us to string words together into any sentence we can imagine. When we watch babies as they learn a language, we may notice learning stages. First, babies will practice making sounds, then they will say individual words,…
Narratives are often structured in a certain way. There are characters, settings, a plot, and a conflict and resolution. Narratives can take many forms, from story books to oral story-telling, and their tradition stretches back to the beginnings of human history and across cultures. Narratives…
Reading, at first glance, is about mapping sounds onto written characters. There are, however, other skills a reader needs, like visualization. If you read a book series before seeing the movies, you may have been surprised at how different your imagination was from the visuals…
Speech can seem almost effortless. Sometimes, though, we may pause to find the right word or we may involuntarily repeat part of a word. These breaks in the flow of speech are called speech disfluency. Most often, speech disfluency happens because of the content of…
When you listen to languages you do not know, you may notice different rhythms. The timing of the sounds in a sentence, or the rhythm, can vary from language to language. You can imagine that each language has its own percussion beat. In some languages,…
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…