Tag: language
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Read: How Bedtime Stories Can Reinforce Literacy Skills
Reading bedtime stories can help children improve their language skills, such as pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Long before they begin to talk, babies are listening to and learning about the language they hear around them. Reading books aloud expands their understanding of language and allows them to hear words and phrases that might not be…
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Word of the Week: Lingua Franca
A lingua franca is a common language used between people that do not have the same native language. It can also be used to describe a mixture of languages where words from multiple languages are combined. A lingua franca is often used between people that oversee trade, facilitate business, or communicate information academically, scientifically, or…
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Word of the Week: Semantic Network
Words do not exist independently in our minds—they connect to other words in meaningful ways. In linguistics, a semantic network is a map of how words relate to each other conceptually. This network has points and lines that connect these points. The points are words, and the lines show how any given word meaning relates…
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Read: There’s More to Your Infant’s Language Skills Than Their First Words Suggest
A common theme that underpins language research is that language development is an impressively complex process. This article from Very Well Family summarizes the findings of a 2021 study from the University of Edinburgh that gives us a new piece of this puzzle. The results show that babies can remember multiword sentences even before they…
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Word of the Week: Phonemic Narrowing
Phonemic narrowing is the process by which infants gather information about the sounds of the language they are exposed to. Every language has unique sounds and patterns of sounds. At about six months, infants begin learning these sounds and patterns, as well as the rules for these sounds. This knowledge is a very important step…
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Word of the Week: Augmentative and Alternative Communication
Augmentative and alternative communication, or AAC, are the ways people can communicate without talking. People of all ages who have difficulty with speech or language use AAC, and it can be used short-term or long-term. There are many diverse AAC methods. Low- and no-tech options include sign language, gestures, facial expressions, communication boards, writing, drawing…
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Read: Raising Bilingual Children
There are many reasons to raise a child to be bilingual or multilingual. Some parents do so because their native language, or that of their family, is not the mainstream language spoken where they live. Other parents want their children to be connected to their culture. Others still simply want their child to have more…
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Word of the Week: Idiolect
An idiolect is an individual’s variation of speech and language. Every person has a distinctive combination of word choice, grammar, pronunciation, and style that makes up their idiolect. As opposed to a dialect, which encompasses the language of a group of people, an idiolect is much more narrow—is unique to the individual. It is influenced…
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Word of the Week: The Gavagai Problem
The Gavagai problem describes the enormous task of word learning. To learn a word’s meaning, we begin by matching words to referents, or the thing to which a word refers. The word “gavagai” originates from a thought experiment proposed by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in 1960. It goes along the lines of this:…
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Read: What Is Speech Therapy?
Navigating the world of speech therapy can be overwhelming at first for parents and families. This article from Parents is a comprehensive guide to speech therapy. It begins by outlining the basics of what speech therapy is and how it works. It then discusses common reasons one might need it and signs that it may…
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