“Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language” http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2016472193_
brainlanguagesbaby11.html speaks to the many benefits of babies growing up bilingual and it also speaks to the social, face to face interaction children need to learn language. Research has shown that exposing English-language infants to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same “dose” of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing.
The groundwork for childhood literacy begins at birth. Parents, caregivers & other adults need to be mindful of the significance and importance of their communicative model: eye contact, body language, over all feed back. The world of distracted and multi-tasking adults along with children using gadgets does NOT foster the type of interaction that stimulates the brain to learn language. Many of the skills children need to be ready to learn to read are first learned in conversation. Vocabulary is the lynchpin to literacy and a child who enters school with a vocabulary of 22, 000 words, words learned in the course of normal conversation is well prepared to be a successful learner.
