Babies are lip readers!

When babies are learning to speak, they pay attention to their parents' mouths. Developmental psychologists have figured this out. Babies begin to read lips around six months of age. This way they learn how they must form their mouth to produce sounds. When babies are a year old, they can already understand a few words. From this age on they begin to look people in the eyes again. In doing so they get a lot of important information. By looking into their eyes, they can tell if their parents are happy or sad. They get to know the world of feelings in this way. It gets interesting when someone speaks to them in a foreign language. Then babies begin to read lips all over again. In this way they learn how to form foreign sounds as well. Therefore, when you speak with babies you should always look at them. Aside from that, babies need dialogue for their language development. In particular, parents often repeat what babies say. Babies thus receive feedback. That is very important for infants. Then they know that they are understood. This confirmation motivates babies. They continue to have fun learning to speak. So it's not enough to play audiotapes for babies. Studies prove that babies really are able to read lips. In experiments, infants were shown videos without sound. There were both native language and foreign language videos. The babies looked longer at the videos in their own language. They were noticeably more attentive in doing so. But the first words of babies are the same worldwide. "Mum" and "Dad" – easy to say in all languages!

Guess the language!

______ is counted among the West Slavic languages. It is the native language of more than 45 million people. These people live primarily in Poland and in several Eastern European countries. ______ emigrants took their language to other continents as well. As a result, there are approximately 60 million ______ speakers worldwide. It is the most-spoken Slavic language after Russian. ______ is closely related to Czech and Slovakian. The modern ______ language developed from different dialects.

Today there are hardly any dialects because most Poles use the standard language. The ______ alphabet is written in Latin letters and consists of 35 letters. The last but one syllable of a word is always accented. The grammar contains seven cases and three genders. This means almost every word ending is declined or conjugated. As a result ______ is not necessarily considered the easiest of languages. But it will soon be one of the more important European languages!