Strollerderby
language
Strollerderby
Parenting Lingo Gets The Oxford Stamp Of Approval
Whenever you’re in a specialised subculture, it can feel like the most useful of words take an absurdly long time to reach the pages of the dictionary. And as we all know, parenting is a specialised subculture. But we’re getting there: In the latest redesign of the Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus, among the 2,000 new words, alongside...
Strollerderby
They Say: Bilingual Babies Learn Better
And not just languages, either. A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared babies' ability to both process linguisitic information and to correctly anticipate based on new information, a mental process linked to what neuropsychologists call "executive function." Babies raised in bilingual household...
Infant
Sign Language
THE BABBLE TAKE Sign-language is not just for the deaf and that Meet the Fockers kid anymore. Some parents are now teaching their hearing infants to sign before they can talk in an effort to better communicate with their pre-verbal babies. One oft cited benefit is that signing may ease toddler frustration. Sceptics wonder if it is worth the e...
Strollerderby
They Say: Rich Kids Make Better Hand Gestures
Children in weathly families already have tonnes of advantages over those who are less privileged. Now it turns out they can make better hand gestures, too. According to a new study undertaken at the University of Chicago, kids who come from higher socio-economic backgrounds gesture much more frequently as infants and tend to have more developed...
Arts & Culture
Mandarin for Babies?
My most vivid memory of preschool Spanish class is of standing in a classroom, in front of my teachers, being tested on how high I could count. While I can still count in Spanish, most everything else I learned now evades me. Francois Thibaut, founder of The Language Workshop for Children, says that's just because the teaching methods weren't co...
Arts & Culture
Anarchy in the Pre-K
As a member of the American Dialect Society (ADS), I'm always on the alert — like a caffeinated owl who eats lexical items instead of field mice — for possible Word of the Year (WOTY) candidates. The ADS has the oldest WOTY vote, and recent picks have include such major words of our time as "subprime," "truthiness," and "weapons of mass dest...
Arts & Culture
