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 ...

Babies may learn words before their first birthday — but not like older kids do. Experts report that 10-month-old babies can learn new words and usually link those words to interesting objects — even ...

Where do you see the word learning research in bilingual infants going in the future? The studies we have just discussed are inspired by the work of Dr. Janet Werker and her colleagues (see here), who ...

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 ...

When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a new study that shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning ...

Sometimes life, with the aid of an unrelenting news cycle, can feel like an exercise in parsing out the particular kind of bad we are experiencing. Are we anxious or depressed, lonely or stressed? Tim ...

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 ...

As many educators and researchers will attest, there’s no exact science to choosing vocabulary words—no inherent reason the word “detest” is more important to teach than “despise,” or why “compassion” ...