A peek into language acquisition: Under the scientific microscope
Conversations are one of the cornerstones of communication. We have conversations all the time, from very brief ones when we ask a store clerk about a product to hour long phone calls with our best friends. A full-fledged conversation with a young child, however, can…
Think of the hours on end you can spend looking up your favourite sports team’s stats, making each and every recipe from your go-to cookbook, or debating with your friends about top gardening techniques. You can likely remember tiny details about things most people know…
Our modern lives are packed with screens galore, phones in our hands, computers in our offices, ads in the subway. In fact, you are looking at one right now! Some screens are only there to be looked at, but others need to be engaged with,…
Children can appear very focused in front of a television. Unfortunately, this does not mean they are actively learning. Studies show that children under the age of 3 do not learn very well, if at all, from television or videos. As children get older, television…
Reading and writing are two facets of literacy. To make learning to read and write easier, we might want to break literacy down and teach just reading or just writing at any one time. Yet, a particular effective way to develop literacy skills is actually…
At first glance, learning to read can seem to be just about learning to match symbols (letters or characters) to sounds. But there is a lot more to reading than meets the eye! There are three foundational basics: First, a child needs to learn that…
When someone is in another room, behind a closed door, you wouldn’t just start talking to them from where you are. You would, instead, go over to them. You would get into their ‘auditory field’ before starting to talk. An ‘auditory field’ is the area…
When we think about languages, we often think about spoken languages, and overlook the linguistic diversity and complexity of sign languages. They have words and grammar, as well as complex ‘sign forms’. Sign forms are determined by the shape, location and movement of the hand.…
One impression that often surfaces in educational settings, like preschool or elementary school, is that multilingual children can seem to have smaller vocabularies than their monolingual peers. However, this is mainly because language abilities are evaluated in just one language. For monolingual children, one language…
Some children will be exposed to just one language when they are young, others may be exposed to two, and others even more. How many languages a child is exposed to will depend on her environment. For instance, in a country like Papua New Guinea…