When learning a new language, babies and young children respond really well to repetition, short phrases, changes in pitch and emotional tone of voice.
Nursery rhymes and songs are therefore the...
Words please, maestro!
Yes, you are like a conductor directing a full orchestra of linguistic choices in your head.
Do you say 'hiya' to your close friends and 'good morning' in more formal...
Just how many times have you heard this – “the earlier the better” when it comes to learning languages?
But is this really the case?
First, it’s really important to...
These are some of the seriously cool benefits of learning languages:
Improved social skills
Appreciation of diversity
Can delay the onset of dementia by 4-5 years!
Can improve memory, the...
Don't you find there's so much conflicting advice out there on the dos and don't of parenting?!
It's definitely the case with teaching your children languages too...
- "the younger the better"
- "the...
Don’t you think it’s weird that the English word ‘two’ has a silent ‘W’ in it? Especially when all the other numbers that start with a ‘tw’ we...
Whether you’re homeschooling a toddler or a six-year-old, languages could be a really valuable part of their day.
Here are our top tips to integrate languages into any homeschool curriculum:
1....
Have you heard of 'the chimp wars'? Whether or not humans and apes share some of the same language-learning mechanisms is a hotly debated topic.
A researcher called Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues...
You've been speaking your home language (e.g. Lithuanian) together since they were born. Your little one is about to start school. Should you switch to the majority language, such as English in the...
By 12 months, babies understand about 50 words (Fenson et al., 1994) and by age 6 a typically developing child knows between 9,000 and 14,000 words!! That's learning about 9 words a day on average!...
Ever wondered why we can identify our own baby's cry amongst others? Some fascinating research I've been reading about at uni this month has a theory that babies' cries are like a little melody,...
Far from being confounded by the slew of sounds they hear from birth (and even before), babies are slowly and carefully piecing together evidence of how speaking works, what it's for, how it feels...
