You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on the Bilingual Readers blog this week, but we promise there’s a good reason for it. Last Sunday we finally moved into our new office on calle Aguas 3! The office is located on the ground floor of a gorgeous old building in La Latina, a historic neighborhood in downtown Madrid. It’s a large, airy space with lots of potential and room for growth. In addition to all the usual office hustle and bustle, we’re also very excited about creating a space for workshops where children in Madrid can come and discover languages through interactive reading and other fun activities (more on that soon!)

We’ve spent most of the week packing, unpacking, cleaning etc. and our diamond in the rough is finally starting to look like an inhabitable place. Of course there’s still LOTS of work to be done, but we’re slowly settling in and setting up what we hope will be our home for many years to come. If you’re in the area, please feel free to stop by and say hello!

We’re so pleased to announce that the dual language audio files for the latest adventure in the Marina and the Little Green Boy series, In the City, are finally available on our website. Just click here, and then click “download audio files” to access the mp3 files. There was a bit of a delay this time due to technical issues, so we apologize to any of you who previously tried to download the files unsuccessfully. Thanks so much for your patience!

Antonio Vicente and Marta Arteaga

Yesterday our favorite author/illustrator team, Antonio Vicente and Miguel Ordóñez, were interviewed on Spanish National Radio. They had a great time talking about the bilingual picture book series “Marina and the Little Green Boy / Marina y el niño verde”. So far there are two hilarious books in this series:

Marina y el niño verde / Marina and the Little Green Boy
Marina y el niño verde: en la ciudad / Marina and the Little Green Boy: In the City

Click here to listen to the interview.

image credit: grins, via flickr

Are you raising bilingual children, teaching in a multilingual classroom or just plain interested in how young children become bilingual? The monthly Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism is a great way to help connect bilingual families and communities from all over the world. This month our good friends at Spanglish Baby are hosting the carnival, and they’ll be posting all sorts of interesting articles. Click here for a great collection of posts from bloggers around the world on their experiences, concerns, words of wisdom or hilarious anecdotes about raising bilingual children. See you there!

A few months ago we posted an article about an amazing study which claimed that babies actually cry in their mother tongue. According to this study, babies actually reproduce the sounds they hear in the womb when they cry. Researchers from Würzburg University in Germany recorded 60 newborns (30 French and 30 German) crying just three to five days after their birth, and noted clear differences between the newborns based on their mother tongue.

This article generated a bit of discussion on our facebook and twitter pages as to what implications this phenomenon would have on bilingual children. Do bilingual babies cry in both languages? So when I read about a new study on infant bilingualism which was recently published in the scientific journal, Psychological Science, I just had to share. According to this study “infants born to bilingual mothers (who spoke both languages regularly during pregnancy) exhibit different language preferences than infants born to mothers speaking only one language.”

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in France charted the sucking reflexes (apparently this reflex in newborns indicates the baby’s interest in a stimulus) of two groups of monolingual and bilingual infants when exposed to ten minutes of alternating speech between two languages. The monolingual infants only showed sucking preference when they heard their mother tongue, but the bilingual infants showed equal preference for both their mother tongues.

To me one of the most fascinating parts of this study is the fact that babies were not just responding positively to a bunch of familiar sounds they heard in the womb. From the time they were born, on some primitive level, these babies were able to distinguish between the two languages as two separate stimuli. According to the article, “infants listened to sentences being spoken in one of the languages until they lost interest. Then, they either heard sentences in the other language or heard sentences in the same language, but spoken by a different person. Infants exhibited increased sucking when they heard the other language being spoken. Their sucking did not increase if they heard additional sentences in the same language.” This evidence suggests that infants are actually born with the capacity to simultaneously learn two or more languages without confusing them. Once again, I’m blown away by these tiny language learning machines!

Every spring thousands of children’s publishers, authors, illustrators, translators and other professionals come together in the world’s most important children’s book fair in Bologna, Italy. During four hectic days Bologna is transformed into a children’s publishing mecca, where the industry comes together to meet, greet, buy and sell rights, see new global trends, inspire and be inspired.

We’re so excited to announce that we’ll be participating in this year’s fair as part of the Spanish stand. We’ve booked our tickets and one of the few hotel rooms left in Bologna, so now we’re just counting down until March 23rd when all the fun begins. If any of our readers will be attending the fair, we’d love to meet up and get to know you face to face. Just send us a note to info[at]bilingualreaders.com or stop buy our stand (Pavillion 29, B19)! We can’t wait to meet you there!

We had a great time this Saturday at the bilingual storytime and craft session at El Hada Trabalenguas. Our good friends Martha Pipkin and Philip Quarterman did a fabulous job of bringing the new adventures of Marina and the Little Green Boy: In the City alive, and kids and parents alike had a blast creating their own cities afterward. Here are a few pictures in case you missed it. Thanks again to Maísa and Vero for hosting the event!