A peek into language acquisition: Under the scientific microscope
Learning a language without any corrective feedback seems impossible. Imagine you are starting to learn a second language. Would you want to learn from a textbook that had no answer sheet? Yet, scientific studies show that caregivers rarely correct young children’s language mistakes. Sometimes children’s…
Grammar can seem one of the hardest parts of language to learn. Yet, when toddlers start producing their first multi-word phrases, they make surprisingly few mistakes. Even the youngest babies have an inkling that grammatical items are different from contentful vocabulary, because of differences in…
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,…
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,…
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…
Imagine you are flipping through TV channels and stop on one in a language you do not know. It can be very hard to pick out words or figure out the meaning. However, what you might notice is a distinct melody. You may notice that…
Children can use all their senses to help them learn language. Touch for example is a sense that children rely on from their very first days, while their other senses like sight and hearing are still developing. Touch can help children learn words. Some of…