Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
slate.com
slate.com
To provide just one example (out of many, I'm sure): I was born into a very poor (far below poverty level) working class family that was extremely techno-phobic. Despite being actively discouraged almost throughout my childhood of pursuing an intellectual career, I always had an intrinsic motivation and desire to learn and create tech-related things. This ultimately lead to where I am now, as a software engineer (and I'm definitely the only one like this from my family, a clear outlier).
To this day I can't come up with a single environmental influence that explains this -- and believe me, I've tried. I don't mean for this example to detract from the positive message of the article -- that talking to children is very beneficial to their cognitive development (obviously) -- but hopefully to demonstrate that it's a lot more complex than just environmental factors.
I don't believe for a second that the doctor believes that intelligence has no inherited component whatsoever. She is dealing with a problem in the real world using what tools she has at her disposal.
Edit: Responding jamesaguilar's and true_religion's point about the title. Yes, that's true. I had just read the article and the title wasn't in the forefront of my mind. But when you get a title like that, you simply can't know whether it is meant as a bald statement or rather as something to pique the interest (or as link bait, if you aren't feeling charitable). So, if you elect to click the link, read the article to find out!
I'm not even sure it proves what he thinks it proves. Is he inherently smarter than the rest of his family? Or just more motivated? Or more interested in technology? Is success in computer programming direct proof that someone is very smart? I think a lot of programmers take that as received wisdom, but again I'm not so sure.
Anyway, if a child is one of the rare born geniuses, talking to them a lot will not harm them, and it might feed their latent abilities. If a child is genetically normal, talking will help them too. There is no practical reason to object to this article.
HN doesn't allow changes to the title. People writing articles will chose a click-baity title.
All titles suck.
If we "simply can't know" what the point is, then how do you decide what's relevant?
But to respond: No, not at the same time. As I said in the edit, the title slipped my mind. Without the title it came across as a useless nitpick, with the title it does not even if I find it an uninteresting avenue of discussion.
There is zero doubting that 'nature vs. nurture' is a complicated question (and a false dichotomy) and I don't think this article is making any claims outside of it's pretty narrow (and pretty interesting) focus.
But, as a parent, I have experienced that children are born with a ton of individual personality that is highly noticeable within days. It would be pretty much defy logic (as well as genetics) if some sort of predisposition for intelligence weren't part of this.
All I am saying is that a particular environment can affect someone in unexpected ways.
I am from a family of 3 children. Two adopted and one "unexpected" natural birth.
One of the three of us has been in prison many times (and we have no other relatives that I know of that have ever been in trouble beyond the occasional speeding/parking ticket).
The other of the three of us is a carbon copy of their biological mother (dress sense, social sense, taste in music/books/films, mannerisms, extreme anti-social behaviour, etc) - they hadn't spoken until my sibling was 25 - so that was 25 years without contact, visibility, etc - and they still turned out to be a near carbon copy.
I followed in my parents footsteps in many ways, more than I realised at the time.
All three of us agree that we got the same toys, the same lollies, same schooling, same opportunities, etc... so we can only put the differences down to nature - and I can tell you that I'm a big believer that nature plays a BIG role in defining what we are...
I've often said "we don't just LOOK like our parents, it's also the nuances in the structure and wiring of our brains".
I have a few kids of my own, and while they are quite different (nerd v/s jock, introvert v/s extrovert, etc) - there are many similarities, unlike my siblings and I.
Regarding your brother who has been in prison many times: adopted boys I know of are often in trouble. I think it's really hard to adopt and raise a child born from someone else. Some things don't seem to click.
I wonder what the statistics are telling about adopted children's success in life and how it is linked to biological parents and the adopting family education.
You can all go to the same school with the same teachers but if one of you have a teacher on a Monday morning and the other has the same teacher Friday afternoon after teaching a stressful ill-disciplined class, then the second child may have a different view of that subject forever.
Kids are different and are individuals. Genetics, nutrition, interaction, and care all count.
You don't understand the claim correctly. The claim is that environmental factors (particularly being talked to) are essential to development of intelligence, not that environmental factors determine intelligence entirely.
The distinction between necessary conditions and necessary and sufficient conditions is pretty critical.
Have you heard of GWAS? They've had some major breakthroughs over the past few years, and have recently had some interesting results with regard to educational attainment. From Science:
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6139/1467.abstract
If you want some more information, here's a good article from early 2012 summarizing the previous five years of findings:
The conclusion of the book is: provide a healthy environment, but don't agonize over violin lessons and other 'enriching' activities.
That said, I went and bought another book with advice on how to talk to your child to stimulate language development ('look who's talking') and we read to him a lot. So, I believe the twin studies in theory, but not in practice.
Finally, on this general topic, 'how children succeed' points out that character traits like grit (willingness to keep trying something hard and unpleasant) and conscientiousness (desire to do the right thing) are more important than intellect in success, beyond some modest intellect baseline. I suspect my son is plenty smart, but what really interests me is trying to foster grit and conscientiousness.
If you want to talk about or discuss some ideas, you can reach me at my email (on profile)
It seems what is really being shown is the rational basis in children to discount promises made by adults for future rewards, when in their experience adults had been unable or unwilling to deliver on promises made.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/02/19/just-let-th...
http://priceonomics.com/what-marshmallows-tell-us-about-sili...
From The Daily Beast article: "Eigsti does not feel her data disproves Mischel—he was actually a co-author on her paper, and she thinks her work is consistent."
The Priconomics article says: "The original marshmallow experiment concluded that the children's ability to wait for a second treat indicated an innate ability to exhibit self control". But nothing I've read indicates that Mischel believed the ability to delay gratification was innate. In fact, most of his previous research indicated that such an ability was strongly influenced by environmental factors.
Could it, perhaps, be that those causal elements in your environment do not work precisely in the way you presume to work? That it's not simply a 'good' upbringing that raises good people? Do you not -- for instance -- have a drive to succeed because of your prior disadvantages in life? Is not the lack of early-life support a driver of your own ambitions?
Second, is there any evidence that the evolutionary history of intelligence was linear? How do we know that there wasn't a binary-like change where one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did, and all humans today are descended from that single change, as opposed to it happening gradually?
This question seems kind of confused. But we can say with complete certainty that it's not the case that "one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did" because generations don't happen at any particular time. Imagine your ancestor through the paternal line 30 generations back from you (that is, your father's father's father's... father). If you call him generation 1, then you're generation 31. But other people born in the same year as you, also descended from him, will not all be generation 31. And if you married one of them who was, for the sake of argument, only 28 generations removed from him, your children would be, in this labeling scheme, simultaneously generation 32 and generation 29.
The reason I say your question is confused is that the model where there was a "single change", and all humans today descend from it, requires several generations to take hold (as it gradually increases its population share), but you appear to posit only one.
I'm incredibly not an expert on evolution (it shows I'm sure!), but from a logical point of view that seems like it's feasible at least - whether it's incredibly likely or incredibly unlikely I've no idea.
Because it's very, very rare for evolution to actually work that way.
In a sample size of one, statistics is useless.
The only reason we consider humans to be descended from rather than being apes, is that we don't look at the evolutionary tree from the outside. Biologically it makes no sense.
This article should make you rethink your example: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/29/chimp-intelli...
It doesn't have to be. But it does vary from person to person (even if non linearly). What would you say affects the intelligence of people with mental retardation?
You seem to be concluding genetic factors ("always had an intrinsic motivation"). But "not all environment" does not imply "some genetics", that is a false alternative.
There are more possible factors than just environment and genetics. One is human choice (sometimes called "free will", but that term has a lot of baggage). I do not agree with the perspective of attributing everything to factors, rather than a person's own choices.
Genetics certainly have a role in some sense. If you had different genes, you would have been a cat instead of human, and would not have the brain to be a software engineer.
But the general idea that life is very complicated, and the results of people in similar situations vary -- true so far -- simply does not imply (partial) genetic determinism. "Environment", or more generally alternatives to genetic determinism, is/are very subtle and complex. The world is vastly complicated, "environment" refers to a million factors most of which no one documents.
You had, in many respects, a different life and environment than anyone else had. Everyone has a unique environment at high precision. So whatever result you get, what would that prove?
You wonder how a person with several factors against them could be intelligent and successful? You can't think of any ways, besides genetics? There are a million ways. Poverty, non-wonderful discouraging parents, poor teachers, and whatever else are not one's whole life. You met many people, some more helpful than that. You read some books. Even just an ordered list of what books you read up to age 20 might be unique.
People don't start the same, but even if they did, things would quickly branch, again and again. 30 identical students sit in a classroom. The teacher explains something. By sheer randomness, if nothing else, some students understand it today, and some do not understand it yet. Then the next day the teacher gives a second lecture. Everyone hears "the same" lecture, but they have different situations (having understood or not understood yesterday's lesson), so different students experience "the same lecture" in different ways due to their different situations and perspectives. Similarly, in general, people in "the same environment" are not actually having the same experiences.
Apples vs Oranges = Looking at Millions vs Individual.
I am a teacher in a city. My students are 100% below poverty line. My student under perform dramatically for their age when they walk through our doors. BUT there are exceptions. You are possibly one exception. BUT when you look at millions of poor vs millions of upper class there is a HUGE difference.
In your line of thought: Poor people are poor due mainly to genetics. I can't believe that for a second due to how many million of poor in US. My children when they leave the school after one or two years are ahead of their peers who do not come to our school.
My two cents.
Keep in mind I'm not saying it's a deterministic inherited thing (it's clearly not). However I believe there is strong evidence that everyone is born with a unique personality and potential. An "environmental chaos theory" does not do justice to unexplained outliers, those with recognized mind-affecting genetic conditions, and many other real-world scenarios.
My situation is even more unusual than you realize. I didn't even meet many people while growing up; throughout my childhood I was almost entirely separated from the outside world (lived secluded in the mountains). Almost no neighbors near by. I never went to public school. Extremely protective parents did not allow us to ever talk to strangers. All this is the same case for my siblings, yet they have no desire to pursue technology, while I do.
Note that by no means am I trying to downplay the importance of environment. I'm simply trying to illustrate that the claim "environment determines 100% of someone's mental and personality development" is empirically wrong.
I'm genuinely interested in what/where this is, any links / searches?
https://www.google.com/search?q=intelligenc+nature+vs+nurtur...
It's a vigorous and deep debate. Happy reading!
As a pathologist and father, I'm 100% confident there are very good reasons for electing to abort in a variety of circumstances, not all related to the fetus or mother, though there is little reason to rejoice in any of them.
Similarly, I am 100% certain that human development is part genetics, and part environment. But we can't control our genetics. So I don't worry about that much. Maybe there's some fascinating biology discovered every few years, but I can learn good lessons from observing other parents every day.
Maybe that's a good way to frame the environment issue: if you really don't believe environment matters, then ask yourself, should you have kids so you have someone to take your frustrations out on?
The metaphor that comes to mind is this: imagine yourself as a spring, standing upright. In childhood, this spring was held down by a heavy boot. Now that the boot has lifted, what has happened to the spring? Is it back to the original height, or has it stretched even higher?
While I don't discount the whole of your argument, this is possibly the dumbest thing you could have said.
So the question is, did your parents talk to you? (not where your parents astrophysicists?)
>> “Now I know I can just have a regular conversation with her,” Adams said. “Just ask her about her day, even if I can’t understand half of it.”
If your parents mostly ignored you, plugged you in the TV, didn't ask you open questions and left you to yourself since a very early age then you may be an exception. (of course your memories from 1 - 5 may not be all that accurate either. What do your parents say about talking to you and making you talk?)
If you didn't get if from your family via genes, and you didn't get it from the environment, where else is left? Everyone else seems to be reading your comment as pro-genetics, but given the quote above, I can't see that.
So it would be a lot stronger case for genetics (assuming it's supposed to be one, and not just a tangential anecdote) if they'd said "No one ever spoke to us but all 7 of my brothers and sisters became top engineers, just like our parents, uncles and cousins (that we'd never met)".
As it stands it seems to recommending having some kind of fortitude (which isn't taught via nurture, or inherited via genetics) as the key element.
Not saying that's it, but when you have someone self-reporting on a forum like this, claiming to be an outlier, there's probably a good bit of luck involved.
Besides, humans tend to do things they are forbidden to. Your parents didn't stop you from studying "tech-related things" did they? Well, maybe they did but they must have stopped it once they knew it was futile. Otherwise you wouldn't be what you are now.
If your parents tied you up, beat you up etc. to forbid you from studying tech, then that's an environmental factor. Them not doing so is also an environmental factor.
Believing something is predestined is bullshit. Genetics might give you a better memory, but it doesn't make you a hard worker. Your success depends on your values, priorities and motivation to do so.
This article is merely a less extreme example of how taking an active interest in your child's education can help them develop, which is 100% true. For me, personally, I could read/write/speak 2 languages at 4 years of age, in large part thanks to my early childhood environment.
If the stunted growth of the pre-lingual deaf that are denied access to a sign language community are any indication, it's probably the most important factor of all, and I think that was the point of the article. I will quote a section of Oliver Sacks' great book "Seeing Voices" that further illustrates this:
The origin of questioning, of an active and questing disposition in the mind, is not something that arises spontaneously, de novo, or directly from the impact of experience; it stems, it is stimulated, by communicative exchange - it requires dialogue, in particular the complex dialogue of mother and child. It is here, [Hilde] Schlesinger finds, that the dichotomies start:
'Mothers talk with their children, do so very differently, and tend to be more often at one side or the other of a series of dichotomies. Some talk with their youngsters and participate primarily in dialogue; some primarily talk at their children. Some mainly support the actions of their offspring, and if not, provide reasons why not; others primarily control the actions of their children, and do not explain why. Some ask genuine questions ... others constraint questions ... Some are prompted by what the child says or does; others by their own inner needs and interests ... Some describe a large world in which events happened in the past and will happen in the future; others comment only about the here and now ... Some mothers mediate the environment by endowing stimuli with meaning [and others do not].'
A terrible power, it would seem, lies with the mother to communicate with her child properly or not; to introduce probing questions such as "How?" "Why?" and "What if?" or replace them with a mindless monologue of "What's this?" "Do that"; to communicate a sense of logic and causality, or to leave everything at the dumb level of unaccountability; to introduce a vivid sense of place and time, or to refer only to the here and now; to introduce a "generalized reflection of reality," a conceptual world that will give coherence and meaning to life, and challenge the mind and emotions of the child, or to leave everything at the level of the ungeneralized, the unquestioned, at something almost below the animal level of the perceptual. Children, it would seem, cannot choose the world they will live in - the mental and emotional, any more than the physical world; they are dependent, in the beginning, on what they are introduced to by their mothers.
Truth of the matter is, we are born with an unfinished brain that requires nurturing interaction with other humans and with language to truly develop. What's saddening is that Hilde Schlesinger's research is already decades old; this book is from 1989. We have known this for ages and society still has to catch up.
[1] http://www.livescience.com/25431-gene-regulation-homosexuali...
;)
I don't think it is equivalent. Saying "Children aren't born smart" means no more than that; they don't come out of the womb smart. The degree to which the smartness they develop will depend on an innate potential to be smart and the degree to which it will depend on environmental factors is not addressed by the statement.
We're probably a generation or two away before we can accurately look at these issues without activist groups and other political groups declaring them invalid because of misplaced idealism.
Somewhere there's a modern day Galileo saying "but some children are born smart!"
I ask as a Software Engineer who came from a family of techno-phobic Pipefitters. Don't we just have a particular kind of intelligence, and they may have theirs?
No it isn't. Think of a young mind as putty. When born, it's just a blob of putty. Children aren't born intelligent. As the child grows, the environment shapes the putty. Some children have different putty than other kids- maybe a little more, a little less, a little firmer, a little more plastic.
Thus, intelligence is determined both by what you have to start with, and your environment. You don't have to be born with intelligence, to be born possessing the raw materials to create great intelligence.
It's not like Usain Bolt was born the fastest runner in the world. He became fast, partly thanks to what he had to work with, and partly thanks to his environment. That's the point here.
>He is interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that "geniuses are made, not born".
>He home-schooled their three daughters, primarily in chess, and all three went on to become strong players. An early result was Susan's winning the Budapest Chess Championship for girls under 11 at the age of four. Also his daughter, Judit, could defeat him at chess when she was just five.
Judit became the best female chess player ever and was the youngest GM back then when she was 15.
Given that, I'm curious to know what kinds of friends you had growing up and whether they might account for some of your 'intrinsic motivation'.
A few months ago, when a similar article ran in the New York Times, Steven Pinked opined:
> The Blank Slate lives: Yet another story on parent-child correlations that dares not mention the g-word
Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.
Depends on how you define "dumb". I bet you'd be insanely good at hunting and eating enough prey to survive the winter.
But a lot of psychometrics is pure, unadulterated, grade A horse shit.
Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives.
> The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
Indeed it is:
Gould missed things that happened after the writing of Mismeasure, and ignored some later developments that challenged aspects of his original work, but he made a number of important and legitimate points about IQ testing and its abuses, points that have stood the test of time.
It's like skimming a poorly-researched paper on vaccines, taking it as gospel, proceeding to claim that they cause autism, and yet reflexively responding with "citation needed" to anyone that dare call into question your insane ideas.
This is your evidence that Gould is a fraud? Nice dodge, but scientists and educated people will notice you avoided your responsibility to back up your words with evidence.
Here, since you apparently are completely inept and mind-killed: in Google, punch in 'Gould fraud'. The very first link is to a Nature.com page: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/06/did_stephen_jay_gould_f...
The basics of IQ testing and its many misuses? Gould didn't invent this topic, and he doesn't define it. You remarks about Gould and IQ testing remind me of the creationists who think evolution was Darwin's private fantasy. If you take away Gould entirely, you still have any number of terrible examples of misuse of IQ testing for racist and other deplorable objectives.
Obviously psychologists are defensive about IQ testing (they should be), and Gould made himself an easy target. But this substitutes substance with ad hominem, a mode of argument you appear to prefer.
Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor".
Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests.
Corrections are of course welcome.
Well I read it and I thought it was interesting. Thanks.
You're saying that if many people find you beautiful, there's a quality driving that, and it's "beauty". That's fine. Beauty exists. But aren't you almost admitting that it is a quality and therefore subject to what evaluates it? In other words, if 5 people call someone beautiful or ugly, are they beautiful? If someone is good at Latin and languages, does that mean they are intelligent? And if someone is not good at Latin, does that mean they are not?
Further, how many people do you have to find to say you are beautiful to be you are "defined" as beautiful? That's not a definition, that's just further confidence-building; the more you have the more confident you can be. But that still doesn't mean there's a point where you can say it is definitively so, and therefore you don't have a true definition.
That's not it.
1. Imagine that we have a system we're happy with for quantifying people's beauty.
2. Imagine that we discover that, in a sample population of 100,000 or so, higher beauty predicts lower willingness to wait in line, lower frisbee golf scores, and redder tablecloths in the home.
The idea here is that from (2) we conclude that (3) there is a single variable, "beauty", responsible for your rating in (1), but also responsible for your frisbee golf scores and the color of your home tablecloths. Now, in addition to using the system in (1), we could in theory rate people's beauty by visiting their home and checking the tablecloths, or by checking a frisbee golf score sheet (lest this sound ridiculous, I'll observe that a real test of intelligence in children consists of the instructions "draw a man", "draw a woman", and "draw yourself": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-A-Person_Test).
In the literature, "intelligence" or g refers to this hidden variable that explains performance across all the various IQ-driven tasks. To discredit the idea, you'd want to find a test which correlated positively with one well-accepted IQ test, and negatively (or zero) with another. Another commenter pointed out that, since we don't have a specific physical metric for intelligence, we can't rate people as having a certain number of "intelliunits". That's correct, and it means that an intelligence-discrediting test could have pretty much any content at all; all that's required is that it be positively related to one existing IQ test and negatively related to another. This turns out to be extremely difficult.
This somewhat murky nature of intelligence as defined means that you're rated in terms of a comparison to the population (we can't say "you have 70 intelliunits", but we do know how to determine that you're smarter than Bob, Carol, and Tom, but dumber than Jennifer). An IQ of 115 means, approximately, that you're smarter than 5/6 of the reference population, which is conceptually all European whites.
So I'll accept both premises. And for premise 1, let's imagine the system we use to quantify beauty measures pronouncement of cheekbones and thickness of lips, etc. Premise 2 remains untouched. Here's the problem: Angelina Jolie would score well, but so would Jocelyn Wildenstein (Google image search that), and Emma Watson would score poorly. We would come to wrong individual conclusions based on correlations made from larger sample sizes. In fact, Jocelyn Wildenstein might come away with the title of "the most beautiful person ever." (And if you think I'm joking, listen to any interview with a man named Chris Langan.)
Since intelligence is qualitative, like beauty or flavors of ice cream, it's about the mix of ingredients. It's about "character". So that while you can make good correlations on large sample sizes, it's that individual mix that defines "beauty", "tasty", etc. Alan Kay was wrong: point of view isn't worth 80 IQ points -- 80 IQ points is worth a better point of view. That point of view is the end result, the character that determines your intelligence.
Again, the most beautiful woman, say, may not have the combined biggest lips and highest cheekbones, but an especially good mix. If you look at Einstein and every other great thinker, the people we consider the smartest, they won't have the highest IQ scores, but they had the best intellectual character.
Intelligence, like beauty, it is qualitative, not quantitative, which means at some level it is impossible to define.
The Library of Congress would disagree with you. The most bothersome realization I had in college was that, no matter how smart I was, how fast I learned, how rich I got, or how much I studied, I could never learn everything I wanted to learn. There's simply too much knowledge and too little time.
Except for that the Hart & Risley study measured the impact of genetics, and found it to be insignificant. Maybe Pinker should try actually reading the studies he's criticizing instead of just reading about them in the paper.
The study wasn't designed to measure the impact of genetics on g, so we shouldn't be surprised that it fails to measure it. It was designed to measure the impact of in-home language use on vocabulary acquisition, which it clearly does well. That effect has been further validated in meta-analysis, e.g. [1].
1: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sbneuman/pdf/marulisNeuman.pd...
Congratulations, you've outed yourself as someone who has based all of their conclusions on a couple of feel good pop-science articles.
"The more parents talked to their children, the faster the children's vocabularies were growing and the higher children's IQ test scores at age 3 and later. [...] [By age 4], an average child in a professional family would have the accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated experience with 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated experience with 13 million words. [...] Just to provide an average welfare child with an amount of weekly language experience equal to that of an average working-class child would require 41 hours per week of out-of-home experience as rich in words addressed to the child as that in an average professional home. [...] By the time children are 4 years old, intervention programs come too late and can provide too little experience to make up for the past."
The basic idea is that the best determiner of academic success is the number of words per day spoken to the child (listening to audio/tv doesn't work, and is generally thought to be harmful, especially before age 3.) Essentially by the time kids get to kindergarten, there is already a 2+ year achievement gap between wealthy kids and poor kids, mostly for this reason. In addition to being enormous on its own, this gap then compounds greatly because of tracking, which tends to be introduced in some form or another starting around age six:
"We found that first-grade ability-group placement can have persistent effects on children's achievement in school over a period of several years and may shape the expectations of children's performance held by significant others, such as parents and teachers. Whether these effects are instructional, social, or institutional, they are real, and they have implications for children's future schooling trajectories. [...] Instructional grouping may have the unintended effect of increasing inequalities in educational outcomes, largely by creating inequalities in educational resources and rewards." (I forget the author, but this is quoting in Riordan's book Equality and Achievement in the relevant section.)
Anyway I'd definitely recommend reading Meaningful Differences, in addition to being a great example of how science should be done in terms of robust methodology, it's also one of the most insightful and important scientific findings of the last hundred years.
The one thing I'd add though is that in addition to the total volume of language, which is the most important variable, there are a few other counterintuitive findings worth knowing about. E.g. reading aloud to your kids doesn't actually benefit their language skills, unless you purposely use certain linguistic constructs while reading to them. And there are other linguistic features you can use that are beneficial, that you wouldn't necessarily think to use without knowing the research, but I'll stop there though so as not to spoil it.
This study would be a lot more interesting if it followed its sample into adulthood and compared IQ scores over time - it very well may do that, it's just not clear from the article that there is very much meaning here when put into context with other studies on childhood IQ.
But I have had a psychologist who specialized in the field say that the best predictor of adult IQ was receptive vocabulary. Meaning how many words does the child understand? Understanding words, even words you don't know how to use, predicts future intellectual development because it says who has the foundation.
Guess how you would build receptive vocabulary?
I am informed (by a Chinese teenager, so possibly not perfectly reliably) that vocabulary size isn't considered a concept in China -- there are words that everyone is expected to know, technical vocabulary, and words that no one is expected to know (by way of example, I use the word "vacillate" in my day-to-day casual speech, but that's unusual, and many native english speakers don't know what it means. That situation is not supposed to be possible in China).
For purposes of my point, the truth of the assertion isn't really relevant. Such circumstances, obviously, mean that vocabulary can't be a predictor of IQ after the age at which it's all been learned. Do you imagine that IQ differences would disappear along with the predictive value of vocabulary size?
Studying vocabulary as an adult is probably not going to get you very far. But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.
(He was telling this at the same time that he was telling me that my 7 year old son had the receptive vocabulary of an average 13 year old. So I was happy to hear it.)
This isn't true. For example, IQ as a 20 year old is a better predictor of IQ in high school than receptive vocabulary in grade school is. It happens that it's hard to observe the IQ at age 20 of a child who isn't 20 yet, but that doesn't change the strength of the predictor.
> But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.
You provide no support for this other than the fact that a large vocabulary at a young age is indicative of a high IQ later. However, a large vocabulary later is also indicative of a high IQ later. Applying the same logic, you should conclude that being exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're old is just as good (if not better!).
If you don't think studying vocabulary as an adult will get you very far, why do you think studying it as a child is different?
A predictor is something that you can measure and make predictions from in advance. Therefore by definition the eventual IQ at age 20 is not a predictor of future IQ for grade school children.
Now can we dispense with the semantic games?
> But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.
You provide no support for this other than the fact that a large vocabulary at a young age is indicative of a high IQ later. However, a large vocabulary later is also indicative of a high IQ later. Applying the same logic, you should conclude that being exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're old is just as good (if not better!).
Not indicative, predictive.
Receptive vocabulary is part of IQ. So of course having a large receptive vocabulary helps your IQ. But children with a large receptive vocabulary when young tend to have future increases in other mental abilities. By contrast children who show high abilities in other areas when young do not show the same improvement.
The theory that I was told is that children who can understand complex verbal things find it easier to learn from our education system. And children can't learn to use complex language without first understanding it.
If you don't think studying vocabulary as an adult will get you very far, why do you think studying it as a child is different?
The research on development that I've encountered indicate that there are specific developmental periods where we are particularly receptive, and where our abilities tend to increase suddenly. Starting with a large receptive vocabulary seems to position you well to make the most of these.
When you're older, studying vocabulary is unlikely to be bad for you. But you don't have the same developmental spurts ahead to try to maximize. Furthermore vocabulary is less likely to be a barrier for adults than children.
For example my son right now loves ants. He is learning things about ants that other children his age would have trouble with because he understands words they don't. But he doesn't have a better vocabulary than most adults. Any literate adult who wants to learn what he is learning about ants can simply pick up material on ants and read it.
Yes, it might well be the classic confusion of cause and effect, but your argument will have no effect on the OP, who is a psychologist.
For reasons that may or may not be obvious, as part of their training, psychologists are made blind to the possibility that they might confuse cause and effect.
EDIT: It's a shame, because a lot of what he says about psychology and the flaws in the science is useful and interesting. Psychology has a lousy history of weak science. And any modern researcher could be making mistakes while striving for good science. So it's nice to hear from someone who does understand the importance of rigour.
You know, you could address the topic, not the participants. To fail at this is the very definition of counterproductive.
> Psychology has a lousy history of weak science.
Yep. People have asked me why I focus on psychology, since all fields have embarrassing episodes in which the principles of science are ignored. The answer is that, although psychologists have clinics, they don't have enough science to justify their existence.
Sociologists are equally unscientific, but they don't have clinics.
Doctors also have clinics, but they're much more scientific.
This makes psychology a conspicuous gap in the system meant to protect the public from charlatans. But the gap is closing -- the director of the NIMH, the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country, recently decided to pull the plug on the DSM and, by implication, psychiatry and psychology.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
And that of the fields that created it.
You are making a very big claim, so go and do the work to back it up.
"Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology" : http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
Perhaps I have missed something, but I would expect that, if they did not have ideological blinkers on they would be saying things like:
"We are taking particular care to separate environmental and genetic factors here by including adopted children, [identical] twins reared separately, other children raised by other than biological relatives".
But I see none of this at all here.
You may be interested to read "The Nurture Assumption" for a detailed analysis of the effect of parents on their children. The basic conclusion is that if you do not seriously abuse your children you don't affect them much one way or the other. Steve Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" is also relevant.
The discussion usually is omitted in journalistic articles anyway, so it's easy to say for readers that the scientists just "have no clue".
For me it looks like this research is looking for interventions. They are not just trying to understand intellectual development, but what can be done to improve early education. They succeeded at that. They didn't succeed at satisfying romantic and simplistic understandings about a genetic basis for intelligence.
This is the gold-standard for testing genetic association, yes, but it is increasingly considered unethical. And is not perfect - twins are still likely to be placed in similar homes (typically both in foster homes, after all), which likely results in an overestimate of the genetic effect.
Modern statistics is about handling the data that is available: present-day researchers cannot rely on a statistically perfect study which would have to be generational and eugenic in scope.
My nephew started speaking early and quite well. He can name and knows lot of things, tens or hundreds of different animals, what he does, wants etc. Some other kids I've seen don't talk at all or they don't know any words.
It seems to me it's because my sister and his husband talk with him all the time, and explain when they're doing something together. I've been trying to do the same and talk normally with him and not talk down to him or some kid nonsense. He talks back and says if he doesn't understand.
A 100 to 115 IQ maxed out on potential and perspiration will get you very far in life.
In all seriousness, the fact that the average I.Q. is located where it is, tells us that's the outcome natural selection blindly chose. And natural selection is always right.
I think that would also produce an optimal IQ, just a different one. But all IQs, indeed all traits of living organisms, ultimately derive from the degree to which they contribute to fitness.
In modern times, ideas are more influential than children. If you doubt this, try to tell me the names of Einstein's children. Give up? They're special and general relativity, and the photoelectric effect. They look charming in group photographs.
Would you rather have two children, or influence the thinking of a million people -- and their children? Which has the greatest effect on evolution?
Just for the record.
---
Some schooling like Steiner education actively de-emphasises speaking to your children until 6+.
Steiner teachers would not answer a child with the factual answer, but instead posing another question.
Child: "Mum, why do planes fly in the sky?"
Steiner Parent: "I Wonder?"
"In low-income households, parents commonly speak to their children in simple commands, and participant Aneisha Newell said the week on directives was particularly significant to her. “Instead of saying, ‘go put on your shoes,’ I can say, ‘All right, it’s time to go. What else do you need? … That gives my child the chance to respond, and say, ‘shoes,’ ” said Newell, 25, who has a 4-year-old daughter and a 10-month-old son and works for a company providing recess supervision and after-school activities in Chicago Public Schools.
Newell said many of her friends and relatives think she’s crazy for talking to her daughter as if she’s an adult. “I can quote this: ‘Neisha, no one wants to sit and talk to the kids like they understand’ That’s basically the response I get."
(I hate that such a thought provoking article couldn't get a better discussion than a college freshman debate over nature v nurture)
in my experience that's one of the best take aways from the articles,
I find even really educated parents tend to give alot of commands to their kids, I would recommend mixing that up
my daughter just entered the 'why' stage,
the other day, I flipped it around and for 10 or so minutes, even thing she would ask say, I would ask her 'why?'
it was really facinating
I think it ended with:
"because I am a big girl"
"why"
"because I pee on the potty"
"ha ha, yeah I guess so"
----------------------------------
second thought
I've often heard that learning a second language forces you to relearn the basics of the english language
similarly, I think that putting thought in how to comminicate with little kids forces you how to relearn communication skills with all people
book recommendation: http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/038057000...
one of the big take aways from that book was not to invalidate your kids feelings, even if it seems silly or stupid to you
I find that to be a really useful comminication tip with adults too
and one the most people don't do a very good job with
Sure, you need to hold your tongue often to provoke more dialogue (not finish the kids sentences instead of him/her, etc); but in the end it still means much more talking than the 'default' amount.
Yesterday was his first PTA meeting and the feedback from his teacher seemed to confirm it too. She narrated an incident when the class was being told about rocket firecracker that light Indian skies during the Diwali festival and our son was explaining to her why a rocket goes up ("it burns gunpowder"), or why it stops after a while ("the gunpowder runs out") and then why it falls back to earth ("gravity"). The rest of his class was more fascinated with the talk about firecrackers.
Her nuanced point was that our son tends to get ahead of ideas and actions by engaging in a to-and-fro conversation about the logic/explanation behind them, thus at times preventing him from enjoying or taking in the idea or action itself or talking with other kids his age.
One of her suggestions was to "explain less" and let our son figure out things on his own (easier said than done, because he's extremely inquisitive and persistent).
The larger point I'm trying to make is that high vocabulary can also act as a barrier in kids engaging with others their age. The article also hints at it, in a manner:
> Newell is proud that her daughter can spell her first and last names, recite her address and phone number, recognize and spell colors, and count to 200. She’s also frustrated that more of Alona’s peers can’t do the same.
"Daddy? Why does the firecracker go up?" "That's a very interesting question! Why don't we try to find out. Let's remove individual parts of the firecracker one at a time and find out what makes it go!"
While I tend to think analytical skills are more important, it is probably not good to entirely neglect the skills to experience and "live in the moment" either, since that seems to be the foundation of many social skills.
Knowledge is like money, the more you have the less you have in common with the gen. pop.
I don't know if they knew what they were doing per se, but that's what they did.
Everyone always and still does consider me "smart." I went to college, became a software engineer, etc... Always had a curiosity for everything.
I never realized how exceptional I was until now. All my friends and family that have kids, their kids don't seem to talk hardly at all. They really aren't asked many questions at all. They aren't asked to recite their address, phone number, spell their name, count to 100. The difference between them and me at their age is very dramatic. I know how I acted at that age because videos exist of me since birth.
- No one, ever
I'm a great parent, but my kid's been pretty middling in his academics.
- No one, ever
Just the standard self-selection bias in response to an article with strong ego triggers (being a good parent/person, having high-achieving kids).
- A lot of people I know.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/health/29brod.html?ref=sci...
But feel free to go on believing that genes don't do anything. God just must have created everyone equal.
But I dislike it particularly because often it feels like a statement: we don't know what the causes are (which is why we make the weakest possible claim by using this incredibly expansive category), and we aren't going to try to find out.
So I particularly appreciate this program, and the research it is based upon. We have a pretty well identified phenomena: talking a lot to kids, at a young age, helps them. A lot. And some people talk to their kids a lot more than other people. We should delight in this finding! We have a pretty clear way to identify a lot of kids whose lives could be greatly improved through changes in their parents' behavior, and that change is widely accessible.
It's this kind of finding that penetrates "socio-economic factors" and in the process identifies something actionable.
In addition to talking, it's important that the parent is a decent human-being. An awful person interacting with a kid probably does more harm than good. I don't think there's much correlation with decency and socioeconomics.
--
"Give me guys that are poor, smart, and hungry and no feelings." - Gordon Gekko
There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name. It starts by looking at the colors used in ancient texts and works its way forward. Some women have more cones than normal and are tetrachromatic so they can see more colors than the normal trichromatic human. But until you name the new colors apparently you can't see them (or recognize them).
People seem to need words to organize their thoughts and reason about things they see or read. The more words you give them, the better able they are to reason.
Interesting idea, but untestable, therefore unscientific. Do you see why? A color we can't name isn't open to systematic investigation. If we try to get around this by asking a subject to compare the "unseen" color to a color patch, we're only given the "unseeable" color a name by proxy.
This kind of claim is very commonly made by people who don't understand science.
> People seem to need words to organize their thoughts and reason about things they see or read.
This argues that animals lacking language also lack the ability to think. Copious evidence disproves this idea. Video of a raven using tools to achieve a purpose:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Z6Mvjd9w0
> The more words you give them, the better able they are to reason.
The better able to reason with words. This is self-referential in the extreme.
This is not an unscientific concept, because human perception and language are naturally occurring, albeit incredibly complex, phenomena.
Animals do not see colors, they react to physical phenomena including photons. Humans use the concept of color to describe what animals do.
Certain animals who learn human language can communicate with us about color. That doesn't mean they can't think, it just means that color is a human construct so they need human language to reason about it.
[1] What physically exists are photons across a range of frequencies, but that's not the same thing as color.
Come on. This is a roundabout way to try to define animals in terms of what they don't have -- not color perception, which many animals have, but words to describe the colors.
Of course animals see colors, in the most basic biological sense. Many see colors more efficiently than we do, indeed see more colors, colors we can neither imagine nor name.
> ... it just means that color is a human construct so they need human language to reason about it.
Believe me when I tell you, animals don't need us to tell them how to reason about color. Why do you think the Peppered Moth changed color over a period of 150 years? It was the only way the species could survive their changing environment and the acute visual sense of their predators.
> What physically exists are photons across a range of frequencies, but that's not the same thing as color.
No, what we call "color" or "color perception" is the biological sensing of electromagnetic energy, which many animals have. So, since we and animals have color perception, and since some animals do it better than we do, the argument has no substance.
While we're on the topic, here are my favorite colors:
* Unforeseeable fuchsia, the color you never see coming.
* Statutory grape, the color of a dress worn by a 13-year-old girl.
The electromagnetic spectrum is continuous; our concept of color is a completely arbitrary way of dividing it[1] up into sections. That was the point of the Radiolab episode (and a lot of academic research before it): different human cultures divide up the electromagnetic spectrum in different ways, each of which is as valid as another.
Animals might not have this concept at all; for example it would be just as physically valid to think of the electromagnetic spectrum the way we think about sound--as a continous spectrum from "quiet" to "loud". We know that divisions are arbitrary when it comes to sound--that's why the "this amp goes to 11" joke in Spinal Tap is funny.
[1] Edit to add: only a tiny portion of it
>>different human cultures divide up the electromagnetic spectrum in different ways ... Yep, different human cultures divide up the sound spectrum in different ways too ... So what ?
Some people have absolute pitch perception, allowing them to reproduce a musical tone, that they had heard exactly, even without knowing its proper name, just like some people can distinguish between color hues, that other people lump together as generic "pink", "green", "blue" or "yellow".
Having a vocabulary of specific names may ease learning/training, but it seems to me, that no matter how many different words for colors you teach a child with daltonism, the child will still fail a color blindness test.
> Interesting idea, but untestable, therefore unscientific.
Astonishingly, it has been tested and falsified. Some people have color synesthesia: they experience various patterns as colors. For example, in number-color synesthesia, the person experiences numbers as having colors regardless of their literal visual color. For example, the numeral 7 might appear as a particular shade of green.
Some of these color synesthetes are color blind due to genetic defects in their light detectors. Nonetheless they appear to experience the full range of synesthesic colors including ones they have never seen by direct perception. One person called them Martian colors.
Then how did they get named in the first place?
As I understand, this has been tested and found wanting: you can ask people to take a group of things colored aoi / blue-green, when they have words for neither blue nor green, and ask them to come up with some additional categorization. Instead of categorizing at random or something, they form two distinct groups of... blue and green. And you can predict what colors a language will have based on the number of words it allocates to color (eg. if there's only two color words, they're always going to be black and white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... )
Establishing causation would require some pretty grievous, and expensive, social intervention. "Stolen generations" or similar would be the accusation decades after the inevitable failure of such policies.
But keep dreaming, Slate.
I think having kids be exposed to several other languages as soon as they are borne, and reading to them books you personally like and find interesting helps them immensely (obviously filter out explicit content, old classics are usually good). It's also important not to dumb things down for kids. Basically Teletubbies = bad, family friendly comedy in a foreign language = good.
In a side note I also find it infuriating how economists always make an argument that women should go back into the workforce after having kids, because its good for the family and for the economy. But what about the kid. I don't want to single out women, but I think either the mother or the father should take at least 5 years off, after the birth of their child, to raise their child, instead of hiring a nanny. I understand that it's not fair to always ask the women to do it, but some one in the family should. It's not always an option, but more often then not its the children of the wealthy that you see being raised by nannies. Ok, that's getting off topic.
One way to capitalize on this would be to create a mobile app which functions like a pedometer, except it counts the number of words you speak to your child. Parents could talk to their kids during playtime, and the device would listen in and use natural language processing to interpret the conversation. Parents would later get a report on the frequency, complexity, and novelty of the words used. They could chart progress over time.
The fact that "children from affluent families were starting to speak after implant surgery, those from low-income families lagged behind." can simply be explained by genetics. I.e., affluent parents tend to have affluent children, even if those children are raised by other parents [1, 2].
All the cited study does is measure how much the vocabulary of the _caregivers_ increased due to linguistic feedback methods.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture [2] E.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21425893
We inherit so many other traits from our parents, why should intelligence be any different? What makes it so special that it requires a convoluted explanation that rests on so many assumptions?
What do we know? Getting Malaria in childhood reduces IQ by a few points. Resistance to Malaria is partly genetic. Are these genetic factors now a genetic basis for Intelligence? Shouldn't we just vaccinate the children and eliminate the problem?
We know that in developing countries, every month in school increases IQ and earning potential. Should we assume and accept genetic factors in school attendance as inevitable or should we just require attendance?
We know that in Africa, using cheap deworming agents in school children two times a year will increase their intelligence and school attendance. Are there genetic factors in resistance against worms? Does it matter where the particular ethnicity lives? Sure. Should we care? Not really.
The image that emerges is: Once you hold the environment pretty constant, as has been done in twin studies (regarding to the above known factors at least), IQ is largely genetic.
But making decisions on the basis of assumptions about the genetic basis intelligence is at the very least quite stupid.
It's really quite impressive.
one related anectode: my boss' 3-yo son said to him, 'dad, i'm not stupid, i'm just small' :)
Quite a few pets sit by their kitchen feeding bowls when they get hungry. They learn to do this within a lot less time than 15 months.
children really grow faster than adults comprehend...
I have some smart kids. I believe this very much. I have a 9yo 2yo and a newborn.
Both my 9 and 2yo are very smart, however, there is an important piece to this that needs comment: Teaching your children attention discipline. I have been using computers daily since 3rd grade. I am 38 years old. I have chronic ADHD.
It is important to engage your kids conversationally from the time they are born, but to also ensure they can sit and focus. WIth my older daughter, this was accomplished by requiring reading sessions and zero screen time daily.
If you interact with them in clever and intelligent ways, they seem to end up thinking similarly.
If you act reserved, prejudice and racist around them, sadly they also learn to mimic that as well.
Is this instrumental in teaching "savvy" ?
I could make my 2.5yo kid seem like a genius to strangers by asking the right questions. As a trivial example, I know he usually says "yes" when asked a question he doesn't really understand.
Fundamentally I think this is an exercise in creativity; sort of like telling a good campfire story of your own creation. So far as people play this game with kids, I suspect it is because kids are easier to fool so the game is more rewarding.
There are better ways of teaching children that people lie, and that information is not always accurate.
Besides, people don't always know that they're passing on bad information, so you'd have the situation where someone is passing on stuff that is wrong but saying "no! this isn't part of the game! this stuff is really real!"
Signs language is the tool they should be using and writting about. Childrens can comunicate earlier than they can make proper sounds (talk). By teaching sign language early to deaf AND hearing kid, you have a complex language they can use earlier than spoken languages. Check this video of a 2 years old having an engaged conversation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o8Z2lzS764
My wife is an experienced sign language interpreter and I lost hearing of one ear so we both are in contact with deaf people. We are actively teaching our hearing 8 months old daugther signs. I can already notice how she stares at me when moving my hands around, but this is probably a first time dad thing ;)
On the other hand, cochlear implants create a low definition channel compared to sign language, it's created later, and the surgery it's not easy. I've met plenty of deaf people with they implants permanently turned off. The electrical impulses generated by the implant are a minimal fraction of what a normal ear does. It's still a very rudimentary tech.
I'm not saying parents should not implant their deafs kids. I wouldn't, but if they choose to they shouldn't private the child of early sign language because of it.
At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like, what colour they were, what did they feel like.’
And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking questions so she found the answers in herself. Like, ‘Why do you think some stones are smooth and round and some still sharp?’ And she thought and replied, ‘Some have been in the water a long time, rubbing against other stones, and some have only just been broken off bigger stones.’ Every evening, either her father or her mother called her in for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself thinking, Now notice what you are doing, so you can tell them tonight what you saw.
She had thought that the game did not change; but then one evening she was there when her little brother was first asked, What Did You See? and she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now it was not just What Did You See? but: What were you thinking? What made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?
When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she was in a room with about twenty children – all from her family or from the Big Family – and the teacher, her mother’s sister, said, ‘And now the game: What Did You See?’
Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but some had not, and they were pitied by the ones that had, for they did not notice much and were often silent when the others said, ‘I saw . . .’, whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game played with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she was with her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of the game: ‘What did you see?’ ‘I saw a bird.’ ‘What kind of a bird?’ ‘It was black and white and had a yellow beak.’ ‘What shape of beak? Why do you think the beak is shaped like that?’
Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding: Why did one child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?"
--Doris Lessing, "Mara and Dann" (Hat tip: http://lesswrong.com/lw/43w/rationality_quotes_february_2011...)
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/0...
And I actually mean that. Not yet. Soon, perhaps, but not now. And I said "pretty intelligent", not that I was up there with the greats. I find it interesting you took that from my post!
We can learn a lot about ourselves, language and how we learn from understanding a bit about those born deaf. It really is a big deal and Oliver Sacks gets to the heart of the matter in his excellent book 'Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf':
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330523643/
A highly recommended read for anyone on HN...
The article also mentions nannies. A problem they have that the parents aren't ever made aware of is what happens when the child uses big meaningful words for the first time. The nanny wants the parents to be the first to hear these words rather than merely report back to the parents that said big meaningful words have been said. So praise cannot always be given by a nanny when praise is deserved.
Although the article says that quality conversation is important, the metric seems to be quantity of words. After a certain developmental stage I am not sure how helpful quantity actually is. There are plenty of adults that I have met over the years that can babble on and babble on. If you are actually trying to concentrate on something then having a constant babbler around is just so not what you need. I consider myself to be a bit of a rambler but not a constant babbler. However, I cannot engage with a toddler in the way a constant babbler can. I go quiet on the two year old whereas the babbler does not.
Further down the line I think that the dinner table offers an amazing opportunity for children to improve their vocabulary, engage in conversation, learn when to listen and when to talk. This is particularly the case when parents have adult guests and allow young children to be on the same table eating the same food. Here the nurture comes from extended family and friends. I feel slightly sorry for friends that did not get this during their formative years, even if they did have more time in restaurants (which are posh and grown up).
Stimulating children's brains through conversation && || other means is what allows/makes/(stimulates) the brain to grow and learn.
"In addition to a lack of exposure to these 30 million words, the words a child from a low-income family has typically mastered are often negative directives, meaning words of discouragement. The ratios of encouraging versus discouraging feedback found within the study, when extrapolated, evidences that by age four, the average child from a family on welfare will hear 125,000 more words of discouragement than encouragement. When compared to the 560,000 more words of praise as opposed to discouragement that a child from a high-income family will receive, this disparity is extraordinarily vast."
For example I was the first in our father's side of family to go into higher ed, but everyone in my group of pre-18 school friends ended up there. Many other groups in our school were characterized by other things like marrying young or seeking traditional blue collar jobs.
At least there was plenty of time for conversations to mold our thoughts. Parents might actually account for less than friends.
What nobody knows is the exact weight of this factor in the unknown equation which governs human intelligence. Hence from a scientific point of view:
"Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations […] may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be." - Roger Cotes.
Excerpt from the preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713.
If this is correct, developments in the last several decades should have been a cognitive disaster. Afaik they weren't.
Children need to be treated like they are real people and encouraged to make good, responsible decisions of their own accord, not just be ordered around like they are troublesome objects. That means parents need to be responsible stewards of their children.
Hold up! Hey, who's been putting out their Kools on my floor?
I'm glad this article came out, and getting this method more in the mainstream.
"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." — L.W.
But in the end, when you've got a government solicited to diminish your powers, nothing beats a Classical education.
Kids who go to day care with other older, talking kids should be brilliant.
I am sure that there are many other no-brainier situations when kids hear more words and have more conversations and are not smarter as well.
Why do these big scientific articles like this always seem so trivially flawed and ridiculous? Is is just me?
Or does it need for the child to speak back ?
You need to repeat what the infant is saying. This is to let the infant know that you've heard them, and understood what they said. It's also to model correct pronunciation without criticising. And you then spin off the conversation to thinking and imagination and play.
"Look! A fire emiGGen!!"
"Yes! It's a fire engine! What do you think they're doing?"
(The 'sing song' voice we use to speak to young children feels silly. But apparently it's important.)
Television and tablets have their place, I guess. Some of the CBeebies content (Children's tv from the BBC) is good. And children need some empty relaxing time.
Some carefully planned educational programs like Sesame Street have shown to be beneficial in older children. Screen time should be minimized though, as it isn't a replacement for interaction.
Does do read the article, it teaches the parent to avoid commands like "put your shoes on" and instead substitute interactive talk like "we are getting ready to go out, what do you need to do to get ready?" That lets the child reply with "shoes" or "coat." It is about interacting with your child.
And it's the words spoken by those parents that matter.
It has been suggested that television isn't itself harmful, and is only correlated with poor outcomes because it displaces time that would otherwise spent on actual interaction.
This is probably why you're not a 'real think er', and no I don't really agree with the article either.