Yesterday my little girl (16 months and counting) showed her caregiver just how good her comprehension is already: Both she and the other little girl (J, 12 months) at the caregiver’s were eating a piece of bread. That is, my girl had already finished hers and was eyeing that of little J. More than eyeing […]

We never tire of research, it seems. The “BabyLab – LBB” of the Laboratoire Psychologique de la Perception at Paris V – Descartes University still has us in the files (from this participation at 10 months), and this time they were looking for 16-months-old babies. So we went there for a study on the use […]

…CHEESE! We haven’t been any more consequential about signing since my previous post on the subject, but then one or two weeks ago I decided spontaneously to introduce a new sign from Baby Signs®: Since we’ve made a habit of her getting a little cheese between the main course and the dessert at night, and […]

The other day my little girl did not like what I was doing (I think I was taking something away…), and I suddenly realised her “naiiiii” might well be “nein”. (Sadly, “no” is a word she hears often from me, i.e. in German.) On the same night I found myself wondering if the oft-repeated syllable […]

In the TED talks series, here is one on language acquisition that shows some quite fascinating findings. Watch it here.

This week I came across an article about a new university study on bilingual babies. The study, published online Aug. 17 in Journal of Phonetics, is the first to measure brain activity throughout infancy and relate it to language exposure and speaking ability. […] [The study’s observations] suggest[s] that the bilingual brain remains flexible to […]

When our girl was just eight months old, a friend with an older child (also German-French) told me about baby signing and lent me some books and DVDs. I had been sceptical before, thinking it was just the latest fad, but now I read about it, I wanted to give it a try. The books […]

Two days in a row I managed to capture my little girl talking to herself, in what I’m told experts call “jargon”. Please listen to these two soundbites: “bap” talk And watch her read:  

After two weeks of two-on-one (that is, Mommy and Daddy with Baby 24/7 or pretty much so), our baby girl has returned home with many new impressions (such as 17°C North Sea water is very nice, fine dry sand on the beach above however is not), but with very little new expressions. If pressed, I’d […]

I’ve often thought about mixing. I don’t mean a young child mixing, I mean a bilingual adult mixing. The other day I was reading “Mit zwei Sprachen groß werden” by German author Elke Montanari (a book I recommend as an introduction for anyone newly confronted with the subject), and what she had to say got […]