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By the time children start school ‘they have the rudiments of adult swearing’, including about 40 taboo words.
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Here’s how to get babies and toddlers chatting.
What’s he trying to say?
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A psycholinguist explains what’s really going on when people misspeak.
Dogs can understand a range of human words.
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For humans, there is a link between the development of language and cognitive skills. Studying the same process in dogs can be used to determine their capabilities at the puppy stage.
A babbling pup produces distinct syllables, visualized in this composite image.
Michael Stifter and Ahana Fernandez
Vocal imitation is a key part of how humans learn to speak. New research shows that bats babble to learn and use baby talk to teach, just like people do.
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Plus, why sarcasm is so difficult for children to understand – and how to help them. Listen to episode 23 of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Learning to speak does not happen in a vaccum. Interaction with peers and the wider world is crucial.
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Children who started school in autumn 2020 needed more support than in previous years.
Learning how to say ‘more.’
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Teaching deaf babies sign language improves the success of cochlear implants – and also safeguards their long-term physical and mental health.
Babies love to look at faces for good reason.
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With caregivers’ faces covered, infants and young children will miss out on all the visual cues they’d normally get during stages of rapid developmental growth.
Babies around the world love ‘baby-talk’ and it can help them learn language too.
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New research shows that babies around the world love baby talk — and when adults baby talk to them it is good for their language development.
Children learn through exploring the world with their hands — and they develop important fine motor skills through this.
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Unparalleled elegance and versatility in the design of the human hand, and the hand’s connections with the brain, lie behind how humans learn to read and write.
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Here’s what parents should look out for if they are worried about their baby’s language development.
Orangutans are highly intelligent, curious creatures.
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Discovering that orangutans can communicate about things that happened in the past provides new clues to how human language evolved.
The bedtime crew.
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Upsy Daisy and the Tombliboos are finely tuned in to the developing minds of toddlers.
New research shows that both younger and older siblings uniquely contribute to each others’ empathy development.
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New research shows that children who are kind, supportive and understanding influence their siblings to act and behave in similar ways.
When parents and teachers adapt their own behaviours based on what a child is thinking, they help stimulate that child’s brain development.
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Using simple strategies, parents and teachers can help stimulate linguistic and other cognitive development in children.
How can you maximize reading’s rewards for baby?
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Psychology researchers bring infants into the lab to learn more about how shared book reading influences brain and behavioral development.
Reading to children and talking to them about the story helps them love stories and become better readers.
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Parents want to do everything they can to get their kids’ school year off to a good start. Here’s why talking with them is one of the best ways to do that.
The resources kids have at school and home influence their performance in science.
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Policies must seek to improve the manner in which the language of instruction is taught to learners who don’t speak that language at home.
English has been reshaped in Africa’s exceptionally multilingual context.
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In Africa, standard English dominates in formal institutions. But in everyday usage it is supplanted by the continent’s abundance of languages – and the varieties of English these gave rise to.