Baby Babble

A new research, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, shows that babies start really jabbering after they've mastered enough easy words to tackle more of the harder ones. After that, it's essentially a snowball effect.

That explanation is far simpler than scientists' assumptions that some special brain mechanisms must click to trigger the word boom. Instead, University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray contends that what astonishes parents is actually the fairly guaranteed outcome of a lot of under-the-radar work by tots as they start their journey to learn 60,000 words by adulthood. He thinks simply talking and reading to a child a lot is the key.

Prof. McMurray found that as long as toddlers are working to decipher many words at once, that parallel learning, and they're being exposed to more difficult words than easy ones, the word spurt is guaranteed.

Comments

Anonymous said…
4-year-old asks over 400 questions a day on average!! I've seen most parents in a loss of words when children throw their volley of questions at them. I particularly remember the time whne I asked my dad, "What is money?" And he was pretty impressed by inquisitiveness at a tender age. But it got difficult when I started asking questions like why do we get hiccups? why do we have to sleep everyday??

They definitely are pretty tough questions for grown ups.
If you are still guessing. Here are the answers.

Why do we get hiccups?

When you hiccup, your diaphragm involuntarily contracts. (The diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that separates the chest cavity from the abdomen. It plays an extremely important role in breathing.)

This contraction of the diaphragm then causes an immediate and brief closure of the vocal cords, which produces the characteristic sound of a hiccup. What actually causes the hiccup is difficult to say - in most instances, there is no obvious cause.

Attacks of the hiccups seem to be associated with a few different things: eating or drinking too fast; being nervous or excited; or having irritation in the stomach and/or throat.

In some extremely rare cases, the underlying cause of hiccups can be pleurisy (inflammation of the membrane lining of the lungs and chest cavity), pneumonia, certain disorders of the stomach or esophagus, pancreatitis, alcoholism, or hepatitis. Any one of these conditions can cause irritation of the diaphragm or of the phrenic nerves that supply the diaphragm - it's the irritation that causes the hiccups.

Still, the cause of most attacks of the hiccups remains a mystery.

source: http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/docs/hiccup.asp

Why Do We Sleep?

"even the most gifted scientist on the planet cannot explain why people sleep"

for more read : http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9407EED61139F932A25752C1A9659C8B63

(It is an amazing article)
Ray Titus said…
Wow...the miracle that is life !!
Thank you for the article...fascinating :)
Anonymous said…
My pleasure :) :)

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