Parents should be paid to spend time with their children to stop toddlers as young as two being sent to schools and nurseries, a leading head teacher has said.

Clarissa Williams, the new president of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that parents were being separated from their children too early.

“Why do we feel the need to send children into an education environment at the age of two? Are parents so distrusted that we want to separate them from their children at the earliest opportunity?” asked Ms Williams, the head of Tolworth Girls School in Surrey.

Speaking at the NHT annual conference in Liverpool, the head said parents should be rewarded financially for staying at home, playing with their children, reading to them and bringing them up well.

“There needs to be a contract between the receiver of the benefits that if they stay at home to do quality things with their children, they will be rewarded.

“Lots of mothers stay at home and deal with a single income and we should respect that.”

Ms Williams said some young children reacted badly to intuitional settings, echoing research that suggests that putting toddlers in nurseries for a long amount of time can lead to aggression.

“Lots of children react well to nurseries, others are more anxious and that manifests itself in their behaviour, said Ms Williams.

The head suggested that child allowance as well as benefits should reflect the effort parents put in with their children.

The proportion of working mothers has risen steadily over the last decade.

Thousands of babies are now looked after by nurseries. Government vouchers giving free child care places to 3 and four year olds have also led to a rise in the number of children in pre-school settings.

Children in the UK also start formal education at age 5, much earlier than the rest of Europe where 6 or 7 is the norm.

In her speech Ms Williams also criticised school admissions.

She said choice was limited “mostly to those able to exercise it.” She suggested that allocating secondary school places by lottery could be fairer.

The controversial distribution of school places by ballot has been adopted by Brighton and Hove, several schools in Hertfordshire and a few in London.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/4oce7j

Mums can improve their kids academic performance by encouraging them to read more, says an expert.

Sharon Darling, president and founder of the National Centre for Family Literacy has suggested that incorporating a daily reading habit is essential for childrens future academic success.

Many moms wonder what they can do to help their children be successful in school. The answer is surprisingly simple, said Darling.

Many of the things parents do with their children as they work, play, read and talk together have an impact on the skills needed to become a confident and competent student.

Singing songs, making up silly rhymes, talking about what you see, pointing out letters and words in the environment and reading together are just a few activities parents can do, she added.

Creating reading rituals by setting aside a special time and place every day so that they enjoy stories without interruptions.

Moreover, cuddling closely with your child to foster a sense of security can actually eliminate stress that scientists believe produce hormones, which blocks learning.

Mealtimes can be the best opportunity to enhance learning skills.
Various programs have shown success in incorporating mealtime with literacy. In Southern California, the McDonalds Family Mealtime Literacy Nights have resulted in parents using its strategies and materials at home to improve literacy skills.

You can talk to your kids while driving across town or on vacation and looking for signs with words that begin with the same letters as childs name. Each person remembers what the other items were and adds an item that begins with the next letter of the alphabet.

Use techniques for reading that have been proven to increase effectiveness in reading time, providing sound effects to capture their attention, making connections between the spoken and written word because hearing sounds in words is a basic skill needed for reading, talking about the story to reinforce comprehension and memory skills and reading again and again as it helps children recognize and remember words.

Source: Thaindian.com, Thailand
http://tinyurl.com/6oy4zr

Research is First to Describe How Neurons Interpret Different Words

You might be able to hear the difference, but to many children and adults, these words sound exactly the same. The problem isn’t that they can’t hear the sounds. The problem is that they can’t tell them apart.

One in 20 children in kindergarten has difficulties understanding speech that are not related to hearing or problems with their ears. The reason is that speech discrimination is a problem solved in the brain, not in the ear. How does the brain process speech sounds? Very little was known, until now.

Enter Dr. Michael Kilgard and Crystal Engineer. Kilgard is a neuroscientist in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His lab is one of the few in the world that studies how individual neurons process speech stimuli. Engineer is one of Professor Kilgard’s doctoral students. Together they conducted a study to provide the first-ever description of how speech sounds are processed by neurons in the brain. This insight may offer a new approach to treating children with speech processing disorders.

“Now that we’ve cracked the door on this important problem, we should be able to understand the neural basis of many common speech processing disorders and use this information to develop new treatments,” said Dr. Kilgard.

The study is part of Engineer’s dissertation, “Cortical activity patterns predict speech discrimination ability,” and will be published in the May issue of Nature Neuroscience, the top research journal in the field of neuroscience. The advance, online publication of the study is now available on the Nature Neuroscience Web site.

This research is groundbreaking for a number of reasons. Prior studies have used a synthetic voice and tested the response to only a few words. Engineer and Kilgard had a much broader scope. They tested all the consonant sounds in the English language using a human voice. Microelectrodes inserted into a rat’s auditory cortex enabled the researchers to capture the patterns of neural activity generated by each consonant with incredible precision. Recording techniques that can be used with human subjects (such as MRI and EEG) lack the precision to track the activity of individual neurons.

The recordings showed that contrary to prior belief it’s not the quantity of neurons that fire in response to a speech sound that is important. It is which neurons are firing and exactly when they are firing – down to the millisecond – that is critical.

Based on the patterns of activity shown in the neural recordings, Kilgard and Engineer believed they could predict the rats’ ability to discriminate the speech sounds. They hypothesized that speech sounds that generate similar patterns of neural activity would be impossible for the brain, and thus the rat, to tell apart. In contrast, speech sounds that generate dissimilar patterns would be easy for rats to tell apart.

To test their theory, they trained rats to press a lever in response to some speech sounds and not others. Although rats can’t talk and certainly don’t have language, the new study reveals that rats can easily hear the difference between most speech sounds. The auditory system in rats and many other animals are surprisingly similar to humans’.

For example, the neural responses for the words dad and sad are very different. (See video.) As expected, rats can easily distinguish between these two words. The neural responses for the words rad and lad are very similar. Not surprisingly, rats, like many children, find it very difficult to differentiate between these two words.

The neural patterns explain the rats’ ability to differentiate between different speech sounds. “Our study is the first to tie the perception of speech sounds to the neural response of the same sounds,” said Engineer.

So, they’ve cracked the code, now what? The implications are huge. The perception of speech sounds is important because these are the acoustic building blocks of language. Scientists couldn’t begin to isolate the problems with speech and hearing disorders until they understood how speech sounds are normally processed in the brain.

Already, one of the most cited researchers in the world on neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change, Kilgard has big plans for his UT Dallas students and lab. He not only tackles ambitious topics in neuroscience, but in the process, he creates hands-on opportunities for his students at every level to get involved. This is what inspired Engineer to pursue her Ph.D.

“Dr. Kilgard encourages undergraduates to follow their interests. They have the rare opportunity to initiate and run their own projects and publish in prestigious journals. If it weren’t for these opportunities, I wouldn’t have gone on to graduate school,” said Engineer. She has worked with Kilgard since 2003, as an undergraduate, and expects to complete her Ph.D in August.

The emphasis on student involvement is illustrated by the number and diversity of the authors listed on the Nature Neuroscience study. Engineer and Kilgard’s research team included master’s students Claudia Perez and Helen Chen; undergraduates Ryan Carraway and Kevin Chang; and Ph.D. students Amanda Reed, Jai Shetake and Vikram Jakkamsetti.

“This paper in Nature Neuroscience is a great testimony to the level of graduate education students receive at UT Dallas. Dr. Kilgard is a wonderful mentor who helps students develop into independent researchers,” said Dr. Bert Moore, dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. “We are proud of both Crystal and Mike for this exciting research.”

Source: University of Texas at Dallas, TX
http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2008/04/23-001.php

Q: My almost 5-year-old daughter occasionally does a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, sweet and cooperative, then terrible and tantruming.

If I, my son or husband don’t tell a story just right, don’t understand what she’s saying, or we simply can’t hear her, she will scrunch her face in disgust, stomp her feet and say, “I hate you,” “Go away” or “You’re stupid.”

I’m not sure how to react. If I tell her to go to her room she freaks out — usually screams and fights further. Usually I just walk away and let her cry and get over it. But I feel like I’m “allowing” her to say these horrible things. Any ideas?

A: Parents today seem to be raising children who speak freely, expressing their ideas and feelings. The “seen but not heard” generation disappeared long ago. Kids today are seen and heard, sometimes over and above their parents. Some children like yours are able to control the emotional thermometer in the family. If they’re mad, sad, happy or frustrated, the entire household feels it.

While it’s fine for children to express their ideas and feelings, parents hope that their children will learn to do so in a way that’s respectful. Your task is to teach your child to manage her emotions and refine her language skills.

So when you are telling a story and to your daughter’s mind you’re not telling it just right, and she gets emotional, yelling “I hate you,” say what would be appropriate in this situation and include a line about her emotions, “You’re frustrated that I forgot the part of the story about the dog barking.” By doing so you’re providing her with words to communicate respectfully her feelings about not hearing the story as she expected.

You can also add, “You’re angry that I forgot the part about the barking dog, but I know that you don’t hate me. It’s not OK to say ‘hate.’ ”

If your daughter says “go away” when you don’t understand her, again say what would be appropriate in that situation. Something like, “You’re frustrated when I can’t understand you. Please say what you said again.” Therefore, in time, your daughter will learn to say, “I get frustrated when you don’t understand me.”

It’s also important to include, “It’s not OK to tell me to go away. I know that you really don’t want me to leave.”

If you can’t hear what your daughter says and she screams and stomps while saying “You’re stupid,” say for her what would be appropriate: “You’re frustrated because I can’t hear you.” In time she’ll be able to say, “I get so frustrated when people can’t hear me.”

It’s also important to add, “I’m not stupid, and it’s not OK to say so to me or anyone.”

Here are additional lines that parents can use when children speak disrespectfully:

A final note: When children are emotional, isolating them often makes the child’s emotional state escalate. Therefore, stay near your child when she is distraught with emotion.

Source: Seattle Times, United States
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/parenting/2004358863_faull19.html

Uncover how the brains of infants distinguish differences in sounds and it may become possible to correct language problems even before children start to speak, sparing them the difficulties that come from struggling with language.

New studies conducted by Professor of Neuroscience April Benasich and her Infancy Studies Laboratory at Rutgers University in Newark are revealing new and exciting clues about how infant brains begin to acquire language and paving the way for correcting language difficulties at a time when the brain is most able to change.

Benasich and her lab were the first to determine that how efficiently a baby processes differences between rapidly occurring sounds is the best predictor of future language problems. Using methods developed by Benasich and her lab, it can be determined as early as three to six months whether a baby will struggle with language development.

Benasich’s research is now focused on uncovering in specific detail how the developing brain processes and distinguishes acoustic differences that arrive in rapid succession. The ability to differentiate those sounds, such as the difference between “ba” and “da,” is critically important because decoding language requires us to process tiny auditory differences occurring as quickly as 40 milliseconds. During the first months of life, the baby’s developing brain also is involved in constructing an acoustic map of the sounds of his or her native language. That map allows the baby to efficiently acquire language. Apparently, however, in some infants the process seems to go awry.

About 5 to 10 percent of all children beginning school are estimated to have language-learning impairments (LLI) leading to reading, speaking and comprehension problems, according to Benasich. In families with a history of LLI, 40 to 50 percent of children are likely to have a similar problem. Many of these children go on to develop dyslexia.

Using several novel methods, including dense array EEG/ERP recordings, Benasich and her lab are able to analyze EEG, ERPs and the proportion of gamma power in infant brains. The dense sensor array allows the researchers to gently measure a full range of brain activity. Those measurements are obtained by placing a soft bonnet of sensors, resembling a hairnet with lots of little sponges, on a baby’s head and then having the infant listen to different series of rapid tone sequences.

“We are finding that children who have difficulty processing rapid auditory input are not just showing a simple maturational lag, but are actually processing incoming acoustic information differently,” says Benasich.

Specifically, the research shows that babies who struggle with rapid auditory processing appear to be using different brain areas (as shown by neural patterns) and perhaps different analysis strategies to accomplish that task than children who do not have such difficulties. Included among their initial findings, the researchers have found less left hemisphere activity in the brains of children who struggle with rapid auditory processing as compared with matched control children. By pinpointing the exact differences in how the brain handles incoming acoustic information, it may become possible to guide the brains of babies at risk of developing language problems to work more efficiently before the children even begin to speak.

“We can predict with about 90 percent accuracy what a baby’s language capabilities will be just by their response to tones,” says Benasich. “Our hope now is that we will be able to gently guide the brains of infants who are at the highest risk for language learning impairments to be more efficient processors so they can avoid the difficulties that result from struggling with language.”

To shed additional light on how inefficiencies in rapid auditory processing might be corrected, Benasich and her team have developed a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) protocol for scanning naturally sleeping healthy babies. This technique will allow better localization of active brain areas. To solve the challenge of imaging the brains of young children who typically are unable to lie still for extended periods in a scanner, Benasich’s team conducts the scans in the evening and asks the parents to go through their child’s normal bedtime routine, such as reading their infant a story, nursing them, rocking and snuggling. Once the child is asleep, headphones providing a steady stream of lullabies and an acoustic foam bonnet are placed on the baby’s head to reduce the sound of the MRI.

“Our goal is not only to develop training techniques to correct rapid auditory processing problems, but to identify the period during infant development when the brain is most “plastic,” or most able to change through learning,” explains Benasich.

The lab’s work is funded by several sources, including grants from the Solomon Center for Neurodevelopmental Research, the Don and Linda Carter Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and a new $460,000 grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080410153652.htm

Like many children, 2-year-old Avery Feneov loves to sing. But her song selection is a little worldlier than your average toddler.

While most American kids are learning to speak English, Avery is also learning to speak Mandarin.

“The brain doesn’t just turn on automatically at 4 when most schools start teaching language. The brain turns on from the very beginning and it’s ready to take on new language,” said Lauren Seilg, Avery’s mother.

The language school Avery goes to, called “Sponge,” teaches Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to children as old as 5 years, and as young as 5 weeks.

“Babies are really primed to learn language from birth. And so, when we give exposure at a young age it take advantage of the way the babies are learning,” said Jackie Friedman Mighdoll, the founder of Sponge.

Before she opened the school in 2005, she spent years developing a language program especially for kids.

“The kids do activities, games, snacks, song, dance and the older kids do some art too. All things that they are really engaged in and have fun,” she said.

After almost two years of classes, Avery’s parents are pleased with their daughters growing vocabulary.

“She can repeat all the words the teacher tells her, she picks up on all the words the teacher tells her, so dozens. As many as she possibly can,” said dad Kyril Feneov.”

“Children who grow up with more than one language really grow up and appreciate that there can be differences and similarities and that we’re all part of that world,” said Mighdoll.

Sponge school has become so popular they opened a second school in Issaquah.

Source: KING5.com, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6pr4s6

They are age-old questions, from the moment of birth: What’s your baby thinking? How much does your child really understand?

“They’re not just wailing away. There’s something going on that’s important to their development, right from the very beginning,” said speech professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington.

Researchers at the UW are now using baby caps that can detect the most minute electrical current being sent out by a baby’s brain.

Little Isabella is listening to a very unusual audio tape.

To most adults the syllables all sound alike, but in fact they are just slightly different. Believe it or not, Isabella, who isn’t even yet talking, can tell the difference and her brain waves prove it.

“Their brains are set automatically to capture this information in ways that are completely surprising,” said Kuhl.

Kuhl and her husband, psychology professor Andy Meltzoff, are two of the world’s top scientists in the growing field of early learning.

Their research has shown up in every major magazine. Their book, The Scientist in the Crib, is now published in French, German, Chinese - more than 10 languages in all.

Several years ago, they started the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, bringing together 50 scientists at the UW, studying both the brain and behavior, and discovering that babies understand far more than parents or scientists ever thought possible.

“Babies learn more in the first three years of life than we ever will again,” said Dr. Meltzoff.

What we know is they learn by copying us. In a very simple experiment, Dr. Meltzoff stuck out his tongue and found that even a two-week-old baby knows how to imitate.

“It shows that they’re born learning. Really, babies are born learning,” he said.

Perhaps more remarkable is what Dr. Meltzoff discovered with slightly older babies. If you show them how to play with a toy, even if you don’t let them imitate immediately, they will save it in their brain. They’ll imitate you when you give them the toy - up to four months later, demonstrating that babies have incredible memory.

“Often times, the parents would say, oh I know I’ve seen that toy before, but I can’t remember what to do with it. And the baby would do the right thing,” said Dr. Meltzoff.

“That’s what’s different about the brain of a baby,” said Dr. Kuhl.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kuhl has spent years focusing on language. What struck her is that all mothers have a special way of talking to a baby.

Kuhl calls it “motherese,” or “parentese,” because dads do it naturally too.

Why do we talk that way? Are babies getting anything out of it?

It turns out they are.

“The vowels, if you measure ee, ah and ooh, in words like sheep and shoe and keys, they’re much more distinct in motherese. They’re further apart acoustically. It’s like being able to show a baby, here’s what to listen for. Here are the components,” said Dr. Kuhl.

She discovered that babies learn about language long before they utter their first word.

In a speech lab, she took 9-month-old babies and exposed them to a second language, either Spanish or Mandarin. And after just 12 sessions over one month, the babies could detect subtle phonetic sounds in the foreign language.

“The babies in the United States, exposed in that way, are as good as the babies in Taiwan for example, at hearing the Chinese distinctions,” said Dr. Kuhl.

Isabella was exposed to Spanish for a month, which is why she now distinguishes sounds that most English-only speakers cannot.

In another lab, Dr. Meltzoff is studying the crucial moment when a baby learns not just to look at mom, but to follow where mom’s eyes are focused.

He said 10-month-old babies, who are good at following where an adult is gazing, had about twice as many words in their speech eight months later.

“So when she’s around in the living room and says, ‘here’s a rattle, look at the rattle,’ the babies need to know to follow where she’s looking and that’s what the word refers to,” he said.

All these studies suggest that babies are learning an incredible amount that first year, and yet scientists cannot explain why we as adults have no specific memories of our time as babies.

We’re tempted to think maybe there isn’t that much going on in their brains, but Kuhl and Meltzoff say it’s just the opposite, that babies absorb culture, language, social interaction, emotions - the most basic building blocks of who they’ll become some day.

“The news is that babies are even learning from their peers at day-care centers, and learning from us so we’re role models right from the beginning,” said Dr. Kuhl.

“It is lasting learning. It’s the kind of learning that makes a profound effect on the baby’s brain and mental operations, and that sets them up for later.”

Source: KING5.com, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6a7zh6

Q. I have a beautiful 2-year-old daughter. We read to her a lot, but she is not even beginning to read by herself. I have a neighbor whose little girl was reading before kindergarten. I don’t want my child to be behind. Please give me ideas to help my child learn to read.

A. You’re already doing exactly the right thing: reading regularly — we hope it’s every day — to your little girl is the first step in early literacy.

Don’t read to her only before bed. Fit in “book time” at various times during the day. If your child is enrolled in a quality early learning program, her teachers will include reading in each day’s schedule.

Frequent exposure builds not only enjoyment of reading, but also “print awareness” — the knowledge of how books and the printed word work. Your little girl is learning how books are held, in which direction reading happens, how pages are turned, that the squiggly marks on the page actually mean something, and that the pictures go along with the words. Those are huge steps toward literacy.

While you’re reading, be sure to talk with your daughter about what’s happening in the book. Talk about the pictures, point to the words as you’re reading, and ask questions about what’s happening.

You’ve probably noticed that 2-year-olds love to hear the same stories over and over, because they crave repetition and familiarity. They also enjoy books that have a story line instead of just one or two words on a page.

If your daughter is doing these things, she’s exactly where she should be at 2. She’s not ready to read, but she’s developing important pre-reading skills. As she gets closer to 3, she’ll start to sit with her books and try to “read” them by herself, turning pages and “reading” things she remembers from your reading the books to her.

What else can you do? You might provide hands-on activities that include letters. Focus first on the letters in her name. Use foam letters for bathtub play, hang wooden letters that spell her name in her room, cut letters from colored construction paper, play with magnetic letters, and sing the alphabet song. Over time, your little girl will begin to recognize individual letters; that’s a big building block of literacy.

But above all, please do not compare your daughter with anyone else. Each child is unique, and progresses at her or his own rate. What’s most important is that you continue to read to your daughter as often as possible, provide what she needs to grow and develop — and enjoy her early literacy, which will blossom into reading at the appropriate time. (…)

Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08100/871485-114.stm

The moment when your child speaks his or her first word can be some of the most exhilarating of your and your baby’s first 18 months together. And, if the words don’t come or don’t come as clearly as you would have hoped, it can strike panic and fear into any mother or father’s heart.

There could be several reasons why your child’s language skills aren’t progressing. It could be associated with one of several disorders or could be secondary variations in normal maturation. Either way, it takes a very keen, alert eye and ear to help communicate the issues effectively with your pediatrician.

There are misconceptions to erase right away, though. The first is that boys develop later than girls. This is true, but the time difference is razor thin — only about one to two months later than girls. Another one is that second- or third-born children aren’t so quick to chat as their older siblings. But, the truth is, as any parent knows, children who can speak, do.

Language is the most common type of developmental delay in children. It can affect behavior and learning later in life. It’s important to know what you’re looking for.

Infancy

If your baby doesn’t turn in response to sound, lacks an interest in the human face (especially mom’s), or doesn’t produce basic consonant-vowel sounds like ma-ma or da-da, take note.

Toddler

If your toddler doesn’t understand or use some pointing or has a poor comprehension of words by 12 to 18 months, alert your pediatrician.

24 to 36 months

By 24 months, your child should know at least 30 words — 50 words by 30 months. They should also be able to mimic simple sounds or phrases. If they don’t, or if more than half of their speech is unintelligible, let your child’s doctor know.

Preschool

If your child, at this age, has a limited vocabulary, frequently repeats what others have said, or has an inability to express thoughts or ideas, he or she could be language delayed.

School Age

Persistent stuttering, errors in sound production after age 7 and poor reading skills are all red flags.

Another consideration is family history and whether or not other members experienced language delay. Genetic or neurological disorder can often play a role, too. There are tools you and your pediatrician can use in order to assess your child’s verbal achievement. One is called the Ages and Stages Questionnaire. Another is the Parents’ Evaluation of Developmental Status. Both are tools that can help parents and pediatricians identify whether your child is indeed delayed.

Also, formal language screening is now advocated at 9, 18 and 24 or 30 months by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Early assessment can be key to bigger successes down the road. (…)

Source: Daily News - Galveston County, TX
http://galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=aeeac1ba7bba6c9c

Parents might be surprised to hear this, but babies analyze language and their environment like miniature mathematicians, says researcher Jenny Saffran.

Newborns are already at work deciphering sounds that make up language, how sounds combine into words, how words combine into sentences and then what words mean, Saffron maintains. “They have to figure it out. They don’t come with English factory installed.”

Saffran, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of UW’s Waisman Center infant learning lab, is the second brain investigator to speak on early brain development as part of the “Brain to Five” community education series sponsored by the Appleton Education Foundation.

She will discuss how babies learn at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Appleton North High School.

In a phone interview this past week before going to a meeting of the International Society of Infant Studies in Vancouver, where researchers from all over the world shared their findings on early learning, Saffran said much goes on behind a baby’s eyes that fascinates researchers.

Her field holds extra challenges, however. “A lot of our research is figuring out what babies know before they can say it,” she said. “We’re studying complex behavior in little people who don’t talk.”

Julie Krause, executive director of the Appleton Education Foundation, hopes for a big turnout for part two of the series.

“We were thrilled when more than 500 people came in March to learn about the stages of child language development,” she said.

“We expect parents, educators and child care providers to be just as enthusiastic about Dr. Saffran’s presentation. She has done fascinating research involving babies’ natural abilities to figure out language and music. We look forward to her opening our eyes to how we can best encourage those innate abilities.”

“How incredible that transition is from being sentient, to not very knowledgeable of how things in their environment will interact and how they can interact with them, to being what a 1-year-old is — curious, exploring and extremely knowledgeable about how language works.”

Saffran, 38 and the mother of two, got hooked on the study of infant cognitive development in high school.

Saffran’s studies focus on what infants are learning and how they do it.

“Rather than just watch babies, we bring them into our lab and give them something to learn,” she said.

In the act of exposing them to language, she said, researchers find out “what they are interested in and what they are able to learn just by listening and being little sponges.”

Saffran, who will share the latest studies by her and others on how babies learn, said she has a particular interest in pinpointing what kind of information babies pick up on in language they hear.

“Part of what they are doing is being little mathematicians and statisticians,” she said. “They keep track of patterns they hear in their environment and do the math and then they hone in on sounds and words, where one word ends and another starts, and grammatical patterns that are important in their native language. By the time babies are 7 to 8 months of age, they are able to find words and pluck them out of a babbling brook of speech.”

Most parents aren’t aware this is an issue, or that their infant is remarkably skilled at picking out patterns.

“Initially, when I tell parents their babies’ brains are doing statistics, they look at me like I’m crazy, but later it makes lots of sense. There are a lot of things babies are picking up on without being aware of that at all. Most of what babies learn is not because it is being taught in any conscious way by parents.”

Saffran also has learned that as babies listen to us talk they predict the language to come. “They actually make guesses about what we will say next,” Saffran said. “They are extraordinarily actively engaged in their environment. That’s why they are such great learners.”

“They can’t learn if they don’t get talked to,” she said. “There is something about having someone respond to you and you to them that is a powerful thing.”

She said some think a young child’s language development in English will be delayed if he or she is exposed to another language in the home. “That is not a problem. A lot of exciting new data suggests the benefits really outweigh the costs.”

Saffran said she encourages parents to rein in their obsession to provide their baby with the most sophisticated or expensive “learning” aids. “The average toilet paper roll is just as stimulating as a $40 toy.”

Source: Appleton Post Crescent, USA
http://tinyurl.com/2jcea6