Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

Toddlers learn new words more easily when they figure out the words' meaning for themselves, research by a 22-year-old Johns Hopkins undergraduate suggests. Toddlers learn new words more easily when ...

(Today’s post is the last post in a three-part series. You can see Part One here and Part Two here) This week’s question is: What are the best instructional strategies for vocabulary development? We ...

Splish-splash, boing, bang, thud, sparkle, and pitter-patter are all fun words to say — they also happen to sound exactly like their definition. A study published recently in the Journal of ...

Preschoolers read a lot into writing before they know how to read. Youngsters befuddled by printed squiggles on the pages of a storybook nonetheless understand that a written word, unlike a drawing, ...

How people work out the meanings of new words has been revealed by researchers, who say this is similar to the way in which young children learn language. The researchers said: ''A lot of what infants ...

Ed Collins of West Newton, Pa., writes to ask how the syllable “ped” can have three very different meanings: “foot” (as in “pedal”), “child” (as in “pediatrician”) and “teacher” (as in “pedagogue”).

When learning a foreign language, most people fall back on traditional methods: reading, writing, listening and repeating. But if you also gesture with your arms while studying, you can remember the ...