A baby's first year brings incredible change. In just a few months, babies go from cooing and crawling to making sense of language in ways researchers are only starting to understand. One mystery has ...

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 ...

For years, researchers have known that young children pick up words just by being around conversation. Toddlers do not need lessons or direct instruction. They listen, watch, and slowly connect sounds ...

From our very first years, we are intrinsically motivated to learn new words and their meanings. First language acquisition occurs within a permanent emotional interaction between parents and children ...

More than 40 years ago, psychologists found signs that children living in noisy places were having trouble learning to read. They suspected that the noise interfered with language learning. Now, their ...

Corrected: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the tiers associated with challenging words. Children who enter kindergarten with a small vocabulary don’t get taught enough ...