transforming understanding

American Street

Fine fiction allows us to step into the shoes of another for just a moment, transforming our understanding of the human experience. 

From School Library Journal

"Grade 7-12-Fourteen short stories about growing up in America's diverse society. Written by such authors as Robert Cormier, Langston Hughes, Lensey Namioka, Grace Paley, Gary Soto, and Michele Wallace, they range from powerful to poignant to downright hilarious. Readers will come away from this collection understanding what it is like to be a migrant worker, an African-American child in a white school, or a Jewish child cast in a Christmas pageant. "The Wrong Lunch Line" details the problems a Latina has when trying to eat with her best friend, who is Jewish; the Chinese-American Lin family has trouble dining in "The All-American Slurp." While all but one of these stories have been published previously, it is a treat to have them pulled together here, reflecting as they do the dignity of individuals and the strength of family bonds across different cultures."

Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com

Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com:


Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language.

Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

The researchers suggested that this represents a process of “neural commitment,” in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both.

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