#phonological awareness

[gettingready2read]

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

song by Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith, as sung by Peggy Lee; Book illustrated by Tim Hopgood.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? The popular Christmas carol is beautifully illustrated by Tim Hopgood in this book.

Sing the song aloud with your kids while you flip through the book. Each page is a winter wonderland!

After singing the song together, ask your child to tell you a story based on the images. The illustrations offer lots of details that your kids can point out.

Ask your child questions like, 'where are the people going?' and 'what are they looking at?' to help them narrate a story.

Reading in this way will help your child practice singing, talking, and playing, which will help them get ready to read on their own. They'll build phonological awareness, narrative skills, vocabulary, and background knowledge.

Extend the Book: Winter Wonderland Calm Down Jar

You will need:

Bottle with cap or mason jar

Permanent marker

Clear school glue

Glitter

Food coloring

Beads, rhinestones, styrophoam balls, or other small items to float in your jar

Draw a winter scene on the outside of your jar with permanent marker.

Add a large scoop of glitter to your jar along with a handful of beads, rhinestones, Styrofoam balls, or other objects you have gathered.

Pour about 2oz of clear school glue into the jar. The glue will help make the jar settle more slowly after shaking it up.

Fill the rest of the container with water, pouring slowly so you don't create too many bubbles. Stir to dissolve the glue.

Add one drop of food coloring (more than one drop will make it difficult to see the objects inside.)

Put the top back on and seal tightly. Have an adult hot glue around the lid to prevent leaks.

Shake the jar to create a winter wonderland. Then watch as the particles settle slowly to the bottom.

Check out Walking in a Winter Wonderland!

[themontessoriacademyofarlington]

Toddler - Music

These children are very engaged with their musical instruments, working together and enjoying the sounds produced by this wonderful work. Children connect with music from a very young age. They enjoy singing, stomping, swinging, clapping, twirling scarves, and playing musical instruments. Hands on experience with musical instruments like rhythm sticks, bells, shaker eggs, drums, etc., are introduced in our toddler classroom. It has been shown that music helps children build pattern recognition and spatial reasoning, both of which are important math skills. Building music skills helps to develop auditory abilities and phonological awareness, which are foundational skills for reading.

[readingteachers]

Phonological awareness is a fundamental skill that plays a vital role in the development of reading and language abilities. It involves the recognition and manipulation of sounds in spoken language, without the reliance on print. Explore the concept of phonological awareness and its significance in early literacy.

[meirimerens]

I would love to listen to your podcast (if you wanna have one) about anything, but something about languages intrigues me. Please, tell me more : )

had to think for a second about what this was about I'm guessing it's my Nopony In This Country Is Pronouncing Przewalski Correctly and now listen..... I have no more to tell you because the like. Concept of languages and within that phonology (the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages) is so wide you wouldn't have enough of a life to say everything about it. Unless you got one thing in mind. But I'm Flattered. Idk if I'd be much of a podcast guy I love visual stimuli. shan't lie I've had for months the idea to do a. Franco-Cantabrian Archeological iceberg... with shit like....... Fontainebleau "water breaking" carving... the Réseau Clastres Only Know Depiction Of [Animal]..... stuff of the sort. but oh well. FLATTERED.... maybe one day. Podcast ideas anyone.

[the0retically]

lol finding out I most likely have dyslexia was not on my bingo card but my god does it make sense

[guillemelgat]

Hi! Do you know of good resources for people looking to learn the pronunciation rules for Catalan? I don't know that I'm looking to necessarily dive in to learning a whole 'nother language at the moment, but I'd like to have a frame of reference for how Catalan sounds. I know it's Not Spanish, but as a native English speaker who has taken some Spanish, I'd like to know what it does sound like, because I automatically parse it as Spanish when I see it written, and I know that ain't it. Thanks!

Hello! Thank you for asking, it's always exciting when other people want to learn Catalan :)

Catalan has a lot of similarities in vocabulary and grammar to Spanish, but in terms of pronunciation it's very different—this is a big sticking point for a lot of learners. The hardest part, if you're coming from Spanish, is definitely the vowels. Unlike Spanish, there are seven vowels in Catalan—the e and the o each have a more open and a more closed pronunciation, which is hard to explain, but they'll demonstrate it in the video below. (This system of seven vowels is actually present in most Romance languages, and Spanish is an exception 😅) Catalan vowels are also fun because if they're not stressed, they change/simplify! In the western dialects of Catalan, they simplify like this:

a -> a

è, é -> é

i -> i

ò, ó -> ó

u -> u

That one's not too crazy, but in eastern dialects, they simplify wayyyy down, and it takes a lot of practice before you get accustomed to it:

a, è, é -> [ə] (this is a schwa, it's like the 'uh' sound in English)

i -> i

ò, ó, u -> u

This video from Easy Catalan does a great job of showing the pronunciation of the language, explaining all the different letters, giving examples, and letting you hear spoken Catalan! I brought up the difference between eastern/western dialects in vowel reduction because that's the only thing they don't mention, but it does show up in the video—the person in the green jacket speaks with the eastern pronunciation, and the person in the sweater with the western pronunciation.

[cannibalisticskittles]

i also had a big ass exam today but that one felt less serious because i'm not even 100% sure that i needed to have taken it this early. think i need to be literacy endorsed within a few years of starting teaching, but i'm not sure i technically need it now. maybe? maybe not? no one was able to give me a straight answer which is why i went ahead and took it now, but i think i could have waited. think i did okay on it, not perfect, but okay. won't know for a while tho

[mariacallous]

The number of people who read for fun appears to be steadily dropping. Fifty percent of UK adults say they don’t read regularly (up from 42 percent in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16 to 24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.

But what are the implications? Will people’s preference for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species? What kind of brain structure do good readers actually have? My new study, published in NeuroImage, has found out.

I analyzed open source data from more than 1,000 participants to discover that readers of varying abilities had distinct traits in brain anatomy.

The structure of two regions in the left hemisphere, which are crucial for language, were different in people who were good at reading.

One was the anterior part of the temporal lobe. The left temporal pole helps associate and categorize different types of meaningful information. To assemble the meaning of a word such as leg, this brain region associates the visual, sensory and motor information conveying how legs look, feel and move.

The other was Heschl’s gyrus, a fold on the upper temporal lobe which hosts the auditory cortex (the cortex is the outermost layer of the brain). Better reading ability was linked to a larger anterior part of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere compared to the right. It makes sense that having a larger brain area dedicated to meaning makes it easier to understand words and, therefore, to read.

What might seem less intuitive is that the auditory cortex would be related to reading. Isn’t reading mainly a visual skill? Not only. To pair letters with speech sounds, we first need to be aware of the sounds of the language. This phonological awareness is a well-established precursor to children’s reading development.

A thinner left Heschl’s gyrus has previously been related to dyslexia, which involves severe reading difficulties. My research shows that this variation in cortical thickness does not draw a simple dividing line between people with or without dyslexia. Instead, it spans the larger population, in which a thicker auditory cortex correlates with more adept reading.

Why Size Matters

Is thicker always better? When it comes to cortical structure, no, not necessarily. We know the auditory cortex has more myelin in the left hemisphere of most people. Myelin is a fatty substance that acts as an insulator for nerve fibers. It increases neural communication speed and can also insulate columns of brain cells from each other. Neural columns are believed to function as small processing units.

Their increased isolation and rapid communication in the left hemisphere can be thought to enable the fast, categorical processing necessary for language. We need to know if a speaker uses the category d or t when saying dear or tear rather than detecting the exact point where the vocal folds start vibrating.

According to the “balloon model” of cortical growth, the larger amount of myelin squeezes out left-hemispheric cortical areas, making them flatter but more extended. So while the left auditory cortex may be thicker in good readers, it is still thinner (but much more extended) than the corresponding right cortex.

This hypothesis was corroborated in the recent research. The left hemisphere had generally larger but thinner cortical areas with a higher degree of myelin.

So is thinner better, then? Again, the answer is no, not necessarily. Complex abilities that require integrating information tend to benefit from a thicker cortex. The anterior temporal lobe with its complex way of integrating information is indeed the thickest structure of all cortical areas. An underlying mechanism might be the existence of more overlapping, interacting neurons which process information more holistically.

Phonology is a highly complex skill, where different sound and motor features are integrated into speech sounds. It appears to correlate with a thicker cortex in an area near the left Heschl’s gyrus. While it is unclear to what extent phonology is processed in Heschl’s gyrus, the fact that phoneticians often have multiple left Heschl’s gyri suggests it is linked to speech sounds.

Clearly, brain structure can tell us a lot about reading skills. Importantly, though, the brain is malleable—it changes when we learn a new skill or practice an already acquired one.

For instance, young adults who studied language intensively increased their cortical thickness in language areas. Similarly, reading is likely to shape the structure of the left Heschl’s gyrus and temporal pole. So, if you want to keep your Heschl’s thick and thriving, pick up a good book and start reading.

Finally, it’s worth considering what might happen to us as a species if skills like reading become less prioritized. Our capacity to interpret the world around us and understand the minds of others would surely diminish. In other words, that cozy moment with a book in your armchair isn’t just personal—it’s a service to humanity.

[ukfrislandembassy]

I think that conlangs are a very useful way of seeing how the biases of linguistic theory manifest when applied by amateurs (and occasionally professionals). When linguists are promoting their theories they often like to make the claim that they can account for all phenomena, even if there's some clear foci for their actual attention. So the outputs of conlanging as a hobby make an interesting case study of the application of these theories, because the theories bias the kinds of structures conlangers actually end up including in their languages.

Specifically, it seems clear to me that internet-based conlangers especially show the clear effects of the assumptions made by what Jim Blevins terms the 'Post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism' that has been the default mode of linguistic analysis and theorising for decades now.

In phonology this manifests with the focus on phonemes and phoneme inventories, partly at the expense of phonotactics but especially phonetics. The result of this is a flattening of phonological structure; each of these phonemes ends up being tret as a unit of equal status within the system, with any kinds of distributional asymmetries between phones only included as an afterthought by means of some phonological rules.

It's why you get channels like Conlang Critic on Youtube pronouncing each of the individual phonemes of a conlang like that tells you what you need to know about the actual sound of a language. I rarely see any kind of restricted distribution or positional neutralisation of the kind seen in e.g. the Mandarin Chinese palatal series.

Morphology is where this kind of fixation most strongly manifests, because morphemes are an even worse fit for the morphological phenomena of natural languages than phonemes are for phonological phenomena. In effect what this leads to is the same kind of atomisation that we see with phonology; all 'morphemes' are tret as having equal status in the system, so you end up with a morphological system that just comes off as a phonologically more bound version of the syntax (but with more lists).

For instance, when was the last time you saw a conlang that made use of the concept of 'stem'? Or which showed syncretism between cells in paradigms? Have you ever seen a conlang that made use of a morphological pattern that could be considered 'morphomic'? I could go on.

None of these are somehow 'strange' or 'exotic' phenomena; they're found to some extent in pretty much all Romance languages, perhaps most elaborately in French, and much of this also crops up all over Germanic too.

I think there might be some of this tendency in the lexicon too; homophony and polysemy seem oddly infrequent in conlangs, even though they're ubiquitous in natlangs (English I/eye and you/ewe are particularly neat for showing that not even pronouns are safe from this). I've not got as much to say on this as I don't tend to pay so much attention to conlang lexicons, so I could be wrong on this one.

The actual relationship of conlangs to linguistic theory is messy, and I'm acutely aware that this is largely anecdotal. Indeed, plenty of experienced conlangers make a point of highlighting at least some of these issues, and there's definitely conlangs that avoid many of these issues (Siwa/Siųa is a good one for this, you'll have to dig through the thread to get to the actual grammar). My intent here is mainly to get some discussions going, because the real question is actually 'how do we get the conlang community to understand these phenomena and make use of them at the kinds of rates that we actually find in natural languages (which is pretty much any language with morphology, with maybe a couple of exceptions)?'

[fairuzfan]

hi! I'm a linguistics major who's been interested in learning both modern standard arabic and palestinian arabic for a while now, but I've never gotten a chance to. (as a side note, we used some minimal palestinian arabic data in phonology and morphology, so I happen to have some base familiarity with the consonant inventory). my courses wrap up tomorrow, so I'll have until september to learn some of the basics.

I know you've posted some palestinian arabic learning resources on here before, which I plan on accessing. I was just wondering if you'd happen to know of any palestinian linguists, or perhaps could direct me to some blogs or sites that could help me out? in particular, I'd be interested in learning the language through the lens of the international phonetic alphabet, as a frame of reference for pronunciations. while I'm aware that the ipa is, unfortunately, rather western-centric, I plan on utilizing it purely as a learning aide. if you're aware of anything that might help me out, or know anyone who I could reach out to for more info, please do let me know!!

also, sorry to make an already long-winded ask even longer, but are there any common conventions when typing/writing arabic using the latin alphabet that I should know of, in case I come across it? while I absolutely plan on learning the arabic alphabet first and foremost, should I ever *need* to use the latin alphabet, it would be nice to know of writing conventions that arabic speakers might use.

thanks for taking the time to read this ask! it's a long one, but I just wanted to put it out here. also, thank you so much for the work you do on this blog. it's been an invaluable resource for me to get educated on the ongoing genocide, the history of palestine, and the beauty of palestinian culture. your posts have really encouraged me to go out of my way to learn a language and engage with a culture I wasn't previously very familiar with, and for that, I'm so grateful. 💜

thanks again! have a great day!

I'm sorry I don't know much about linguistics but that sounds really cool. There's actually a method for us to write in Latin letters to represent certain sounds and letters through digital communication (for example we use 7 to distinguish to h sound we say from the back of the throat as opposed to the softer h sound — ح as 7 and ه as h respectively).

If you see random numbers sometimes in the middle of words, that usually means that we wanna make sure that the full meaning is conveyed without ambiguity.

If someone else has resources about linguistics, lmk!

Thank you so much for saying this also, I really appreciate it!

[runawaymun]

#prev is being unable/struggling to read music a form of dyslexia????? because... #i took piano lessons for years and it was super fucking hard and it took me so long to even start to be able to read it (very slowly) #and now that i don't play the piano anymore i forgot everything #and i've always felt weird for it #polls

@evergardenwall

It doesn't guarantee a diagnosis, BUT yes, dyslexia absolutely affects sight reading music (and the ability to learn how to play music in general), so it can be marked as a possible symptom contributing to a larger whole. Everybody with dyslexia is a little different, but dyslexia affects visual tracking (up, down, left, right) which is necessary to understand a staff, and also impacts a person's ability to decode symbols that non-dyslexic people wouldn't have any trouble telling the difference between. On that note (hah) it also affects the coordination necessary to be able to move hands and feet independently of each other in order to even navigate an instrument, and it also impacts rhythm, timing, sense of pitch, and general phonological awareness.

However! Music is a really good exercise for people with dyslexia for this exact reason, so long as it's taught with patience and understanding re the person's needs. But yeah. Nobody knew I had dyslexia lmao -- because I don't have much trouble reading, writing, or spelling (except with words that have a lot of symmetry, oddly enough), but it severely hamstrung my ability to do anything related to math or music. I still have trouble with number sequences (phone numbers, credit card numbers, captchas esp are all nightmares), words with symmetry in how they are spelled, and I really struggle with math...not with understanding it, just with symbol recognition. It's easy for me to mess up an equation simply because I can't read it. Sight reading a music sheet isn't something I've ever tried going back to but eventually I might give it a go. I have strategies to navigate my issues around word symmetry and number strings, so I'm sure other people have come up with strategies around reading a staff!

[gettingready2read]

Here We Go Digging for Dinosaur Bones by Susan Lendroth, illustrated by Bob Kolar

Sing and dance along with this story as we search for dinosaur bones, then excavate, clean, and put the bones back together in a museum.

This book is sung to the tune of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, with added paragraphs explaining what the young scientists in the pictures are doing. This book is great for classroom reading!

Here We Go Digging for Dinosaur Bones will help kids practice singing, talking, and playing. It'll build phonological awareness, vocabulary, and background knowledge.

Extend the book with homemade fossils!

Bury a small plastic dinosaur toy in a mixture of cornstarch and water. In a day or two the cornstarch will dry into a fossil that your child will be able to dig up!

You will need:

1 small plastic dinosaur toy

cornstarch

water

a small container

tools for excavating (for example, brushes, hammers, toothpicks)

Instructions:

Mix 1 part water with 2 parts cornstarch to make a thick mixture called oobleck. Let your child mix this with their hands so they can feel the interesting texture. Oobleck is lots of fun to play with so you may want to make extra! Fill a small containter with the oobleck and drop your dinosaur inside. It should be completely buried.

Leave this to dry completely. Be patient, this could take a couple of days! You can tell it's dry when it starts to crack along the surface.

Once it's dry, gather tools scientists might use to excavate fossils. You can try brushes, hammers, toothpicks, and anything else you think might help you carefully excavate the dinosaur.

Take the hardened fossil out of the plastic container and let your child dig out the dinosaur!

[abidethetempest]

This post may come off as somewhat vent-ish. I promise I'm not angry or upset with anyone, simply frustrated in general.

A few times now, I've seen ppl miscontrue my Eliksni conlang project as being something made by multiple people. Oftentimes it is said in a very kind and well-intentioned way as they simply don't realize that this project is my own personal one. I don't want my corrections to ever come off as rude, angry, or intended to do anything except gently dispel the notion. However, I'm a very protective person over my projects, and the misconception that the work I did was not, in fact, all done by me, makes me very defensive. I'm aware my reaction is not entirely rational and am doing my best not to let my emotions dictate my behaviour on this front.

The point is this: with the exception of words pulled from/inspired by canonical sources, the work on the Eliksni conlang as of this post is all my own. The dictionary is populated almost entirely by words I created. The grammar is all my own. The phonology, syntax, and everything else I've so far made and shared is my own. I understand newcomers to this project might not realize this at a glance, so I may include some kind of note about this on future posts or link to my masterpost which also mentions the fact that this is a solo project. Mostly I just felt the need to get this off my chest and clear the air. Thank you for reading.

[tanadrin]

Many languages used to be only written components, afaik - the ancient Greek texts, literary Chinese, Roman literature and all that were usually done without any punctuation or spaces. At some point in the west, it became common in the west to make points between each word, which turned into spaces, and in like "medieval" (not sure how accurate the term is) China they started leaving a space free if a sentence ended.

you misunderstand by what i mean by a language with only written components. by that i mean a language which is not spoken at all, which has no phonology, which is only found in symbolic representation. this is not, as far as i am aware, a thing that exists.

[readersmagnet]

Janice Jobey, author of 12 Little Ducks, is an early childhood expert with a Master's in Child Development and Education who advocates for phonological awareness in young children. With a wealth of knowledge in literacy, learning, diversity, and mental health, she supports infants and toddlers with disabilities and instructs college students. Janice is a sought-after speaker, passionate about literacy development, self-regulation, and challenging behaviors in young children.

Visit https://www.janijobooks.com/ to learn more about Janice Jobey and her other works.

[conlangcrab]

Redirected ask from @thecrazyneographist

I am glad to accept that, though you should be aware I won't be able to work on it until the weekend since I got a commissioner in the queue already (serious-tabaxi) due in Friday.

Though to be fair, that's. A fairly abstract ask, as in you provide a phonology but not a single word on the style, on the writing medium, the kind of writing system (alphabet, abjad, abugida, syllabary, alphasyllabary, featural).

@casual-mitosis-collective