Obama Turkey ‘Pardon’ Not Good Enough For PETA:
t’s just not good enough for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that the White House symbolically pardons two massive turkeys on the eve of each Thanksgiving.
Now PETA wants to retire the word pardon.
At issue: Pardons are used to free crooks. And, they say, the birds are innocent victims.
“Our findings suggest that parents should not be overly concerned that late-talking at age 2 years will result in enduring language and psychological difficulties for the child. There is good evidence that most late-talking children will catch up to the language skills of other children,” said Whitehouse. “The best thing that parents can do is provide a rich language-learning environment for their children,” he added. “This means getting down on the floor and playing with their child, talking with them, reading to them, interacting with them at their level.”
Most people already know the cultural advantages of learning foreign languages, but now it appears there are also health benefits to being able to speak in more than one tongue, said lead researcher Magali Perquin, of the Center for Health Studies from the Public Research Center for Health in Luxembourg.
“People who practice different languages might develop particular cognitive processes that may help them to be more resistant to brain aging and cognitive decline when getting old,” Perquin added. “It might even provide additional motivation to learn new languages, which is quite interesting.”
Border Collie Comprehends Over 1000 Object Names as Verbal Referents
The authors demonstrated that their dog, Chaser, learned the names of 1022 objects—no upper limit is apparent—they stopped training the dog after three years due to their time constraints, not because the dog could not learn more names. This study demonstrates Chaser’s ability to learn the names of proper nouns, and her extensive vocabulary was tested repeatedly under carefully controlled conditions. The authors admitted that she remembered the names of each of her 1022 toys better than they could. Chaser’s ability to learn and remember more than 1000 proper nouns, each mapped to a unique object, revealed clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning receptive human language: the ability to discriminate between 1022 different sounds representing names of objects, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, an extensive vocabulary, and a substantial memory system that allowed the mapping of many auditory stimuli to many visual stimuli.
(Image via wofford.edu)
— New Research Finds Number Talk Is Important Before Preschool
An ongoing mishmash of the old and new from U.S. News & World Report. Curated on the side by brownpau.
