language development

The frequency of reading to children at a young age has been proven, by a study undertaken in 2013, by Guyonne Kalb and Jan C. van Ours, to be a directly causative factor on their learning outcomes, when they go on to school, irrespective of their family backgrounds and home environments. The research, the outcome […]

According to neuroscientists, the development of handwriting skills is a crucial part of a child’s development. Our brains are hard-wired to learn language, in both its written and spoken forms. However, as we depend more and more on communicating in text, via computers, mobile phones and iPads, some educators are questioning whether handwriting has a […]

ADHD is getting quite a run in NT&C’s blog posts. So far, we have looked at the role played by the mother’s diet during gestation and discussed the idea that the child with ADHD does not deliberately choose to behave as they do. This, the third on the topic of ADHD, looks at the seemingly […]

1. A lot of brain architecture is shaped during the first three years after birth. However, despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the window of opportunity for brain development does not close on a child’s third birthday. While the regions of the brain dedicated to higher-order functions, which involve most social, emotional, and cognitive […]

A study, by scientists at West Chester University and the University of Delaware, which appeared in the journal Child Development and funded by the Research: Art Works program at the National Endowment for the Arts proposes that arts programs may help lower stress in economically disadvantaged pre-schoolers. Everyone should know, these days, that poverty can […]

In order to learn new words, researchers have found that children use an automatic object-association technique, which is remarkably similar to how robots learn. Young children are notorious for how quickly they can pick up words. In order to better understand the mechanics of such early learning, a new study tested the object association skills […]

The weight debate goes on... The association between Body Mass Index (BMI) and child development has been recently investigated in over seven and a half thousand South Australian children at school entry. Unlike many previous studies which combined groups of both thin and healthy weight children as the baseline, this study differentiated between thinness and [...]

Work at the Research School of Psychology of the Australian National University shows that toddlers’ symbolic play, which involves use of the imagination, promotes language development more effectively than functional play, such as solving puzzles, building with blocks or drawing. Over fifty infants’ early language development was tracked according to the style of play toddlers […]