Hi everyone, here is some news that we at Child Development Made Simple would like to share with you. Efrat Cohen over at GiftedSpeech dropped us a line to tell us about an exciting new product that is due to be launched shortly. Head over and check out this great new Child Development Tool

Prepare Your Child to Speak Any Language
GiftedSpeech aims to make children accent-free for life.

New York, NY – November 16, 2010 – What if your little girl could speak French with the flair of Brigitte Bardot or Spanish with the sweetness of Penelope Cruz? GiftedSpeech teaches children the sounds of several languages at the same time, developing their ability to acquire the authentic accent of any language. This training gives them the extra edge they need to compete and have every opportunity in a globalized world.

Do you know which language will most benefit your child 20 years from now? Will it be German, Russian or Mandarin? Will your daughter fall in love with France, or your son find a career in Costa Rica? Whatever the case may be, foreign language skills are becoming more and more important in a world that’s shrinking by the day.

In the first release of this patent-pending software, animated videos and fun games teach English-speaking children from four to six years old the sounds of Spanish, French and Mandarin. And since the sounds of these languages are also shared by other languages, GiftedSpeech actually provides a foundation in multiple languages. Therefore, children can use GiftedSpeech as a companion when learning a specific language or as a precursor to learning almost any other language – no matter what language they choose to learn, and when.

GiftedSpeech also gives parents a valuable opportunity to expose their children to other cultures through fun stories, to foster within them a love of foreign languages, and to give them a leg up in future language-learning.

Members of the applied linguistic community have contributed to the development of GiftedSpeech, and its software has already been received enthusiastically by early childhood education practitioners of languages other than English. As a pioneer in a growing new discipline, GiftedSpeech will unveil its first software release on November 20 at the 2010 Annual Convention and World Languages Expo of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

How Does it Work?

GiftedSpeech teaches children through interactive, entertaining computer modules. Each module contains a short animated story that young children will find cute, colorful and captivating. Foreign words are strategically embedded in the narrative, and these words contain sounds common to several foreign languages – think of the rolling r of Spanish, the musical tones of Mandarin and the sophisticated vowels of French. Children seamlessly absorb these sounds, which lays the foundation for a variety of languages rather than just one.

Each module also includes four different games, a game-like test and a recording session that allows children to record their own speech to hear how they’re pronouncing the words. These activities challenge children to recognize and produce the sounds they just learned, which is a critical part of the learning process. Children can also send their voice recordings to GiftedSpeech to obtain expert analysis and feedback. Results are immediate and measurable, and parents and teachers can monitor progress with automated reports.

GiftedSpeech is designed to be as fun, engaging and age-appropriate as possible. Its software is based on audiovisual instruction and doesn’t require any reading or writing skills, nor special assistance from Mom and Dad. That allows children to learn and play independently, clicking their way to an accent-free future.

A Window of Opportunity

Any adult who has ever learned a foreign language, and any teacher who has ever taught one, knows how difficult it is to get an accent right. It’s tough not to sound like a foreigner. That’s because the ability to learn to speak new languages diminishes after the age of 10. It’s a well-established fact that children have a much easier time than adults in learning to speak new languages; they can adopt the correct sounds and intonations of a language just as easily as they can absorb its vocabulary and grammar. This makes children especially adept at mastering native-like accents.

GiftedSpeech takes advantage of this window of opportunity by teaching young children a bank of sounds common to the world’s 15 most widely spoken languages (other than English), starting with Mandarin, Spanish and French. Think of it as a “sound inoculation” that allows children to recognize, distinguish and produce more authentic accents in any language they learn in the future, no matter when in life they choose to learn it.

Check out GiftedSpeech.com to learn more about this novel approach to early language-education! You can also follow GiftedSpeech on Facebook & Twitter.

About GiftedSpeech
GiftedSpeech was founded in 2010 by CEO Gadi BenMark, a Harvard MBA and licensed lawyer who speaks five languages. He is joined by a team of top-notch experts in linguistics and childhood language-education. The company, headquartered in New York, is self- and grant-funded. GiftedSpeech’s research-based and patent-pending software gives children a multi-language foundation so they can master the accents of multiple languages in the future.

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