An international team has developed a wireless virtual reality environment that can help promote language learning and let students practice. The researchers have demonstrated their Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment with Mexican engineering students carrying out listening comprehension practice in English as a foreign language.

Infants who are raised in bilingual homes learned two similar-sounding words in a laboratory task at a later age than babies who are raised in homes where only one language is spoken.

Despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby.”

In our global world, writer David Burke says, Americans must improve their language skills, and should start at an early age. VOA's Mike O'Sullivan spoke with the author, who has taught American slang to foreign English learners, and is now using fairy tales to teach foreign languages to American children.

Think you haven’t got the aptitude to learn foreign language? New research led by Northwestern University neuroscientists suggests that the problem, quite literally, could be in your head.

To learn a language, a child must learn a set of all-purpose rules, such as "a sentence can be formed by combining a subject, a verb and an object" that can be used in an infinite number of ways. A new study shows that by the age of seven months, human infants are on the lookout for abstract rules - and that they know the best place to look for such abstractions is in human speech.