From the time I was a child I can remember my mother sprinkling her communications to me with words that you wouldn’t expect a child to understand, but when she labeled me dilatory or exasperating, I understood very well what she meant.

I have been told one or two times that I shouldn’t speak in adult language to children because they don’t understand. But how do children learn any word, indeed, how do they learn language? By hearing it spoken. When I speak in Spanish to my 7-year-old son, people ask in amazement “Does he speak Spanish”? I usually answer, “No, not yet”.

Now some research done by a Johns Hopkins undergraduate shows that toddlers learn words faster if they learn by inference rather than instruction. Letting children puzzle out the meaning of a word for themselves leads to longer lasting knowledge than teaching by instruction only.

Meredith Brinster worked with children 36 to 42 months. By introducing objects and names for them in two ways, she measured how quickly children learned new words and which method helped them remember what they had learned.

Using a familiar object, say a ball and a second, unfamiliar object such as a tool, Brinster introduced a nonsense word like “blicket” and ask children to point out the object that went with the word. Because the ball was familiar and the children knew the name for that object, they were able to infer that the unfamiliar object was the “blicket”.

A second group of children was shown an object and told that it was a “blicket” using a direct instructional form of teaching.

Later when children were asked to point out the “blicket” it was clear that those children who had used reason to determine which object was the “blicket” remembered the information better and longer than those who had simply been taught the name of the object.

Undergrad: Kids Learn Words Best by Working out Meaning Study by New Jersey senior shows inference is best strategy for toddlers

Alcoholics have smaller brain volumes, probably due to the toxic effects of ethanol that causes the brain to shrink more with aging - but a new study shows that the brains of children of alcohol-dependent parents have reduced intracranial volume before they even take a drink.

The study by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is the first to demonstrate that for children of alcoholics, brain size is affected before the onset of alcohol dependence.

Intracranial volume, or ICV, was found to be about 4 percent smaller in adult children of alcoholic parents than in adults who had no family history of alcoholism. IQ scores in alcoholic individuals whose parents were also alcoholic were found to average 5.7 points lower than in alcoholics whose parents were not alcohol-dependent.

The authors note that a possible implication of their findings is that the increased risk for alcoholism among children of alcoholics may be due to a genetic or environmental effect, or both, related to reduced brain growth.

“Although ICV is known to be influenced primarily by genetic factors,” says Dr. Daniel Hommer, senior author of the study,“many studies have found that living in an enriched environment promotes central nervous system growth and development. It seems likely that alcoholics, in general, are raised in less than optimal environments and thus that genetics and environment both contribute to the smaller ICV observed in family history positive alcoholics.”

Study Finds Reduced Brain Growth in Alcoholics with Family Drinking History