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A Bird’s Eye View: Using Distancing Language with Negative Memories
Why does [insert your name here] feel this way? ‘Distancing’ yourself from the situation when you reflect on negative past events might be an easy way to make you feel better. A recent study demonstrated that distanced self-talk decreased negative feelings about a wide range of memories, and across a variety of people.
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Baby Talk: Why your child may not be as chatty as their friends.
Parents and teachers of young children often express fears of a child’s language delay. A missing piece of this conversation is the wide variety of language skills at early stages in development that are all within normative ranges.
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No Brain Gets Left Behind
This article is authored by Dominic Tran with the mentorship of Sarah M. Tashjian and is a part of the 2018 pre-graduate spotlight week. For most kids in the United States, formal schooling begins at the age of 5 as they enter elementary school and learn the essential skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. Although…
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Obscurantism: Lame explanations to the lame questions
“Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.” Your intuition can fail you on what is genius and what is asinine. Good thinking strives, almost as its prime directive, to clarify. It doesn’t mean a discussion you have with someone else on a…
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Please Mind the (Language) Gap
As a general rule of development, the progression of skills usually improve overtime. However, language learning is one domain where the abilities of infants far exceeds that of adults. Research examining young children’s early processing of language have provided insight into timing and environmental contexts that promote linguistic development. Prior to 6 months, infants possess…
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What do we mean when we say ‘bilingual’?
The New York Times published an opinion piece this weekend titled, Are We Really Monolingual?. The piece mainly focuses on the various issues in how we try to estimate the number of languages a person speaks. The article writes, Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other…
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50, 100, 1000 words for snow: Does the language we speak affect how we think?
Kate Bush, a British singer-songwriter, released a new album this past Monday, titled 50 Words for Snow. The inspiration for this album title comes from the popular belief that the Eskimo language had many, many words for snow because the Eskimo people differentiated all the different types of snow they experienced. On this album, Kate…
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How to Raise a Bilingual Child
As promised from my previous blog on the costs and benefits of bilingualism, here are some strategies to create a home environment ripe for bilingualism. With its many benefits, parents may choose to raise their children as bilinguals. But after making that decision, the goal of helping their children “obtain” bilingualism becomes the next biggest…
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To Bilingual or Not to Bilingual? – That is the Question
Raising a child is no easy task (or so I’ve heard from my own mother). With many decisions to make regarding your child, where do you even begin? Well, let’s take it one question at a time. Have you ever thought of or are currently considering raising your child as a bilingual? There has been…