Your Baby Can Read....Research?

[Peter Gordon]

Liz,

Although I have not investigated this program, I have seen it on TV too.  It
seems clear that babies are not "reading" in the sense of acquiring a
grapheme to phoneme correspondence for alphabetic symbols, but instead are
associating the whole word-shape with its sound.  So the skill could not
transfer, say, to novel type faces and it would definitely not transfer to
novel words that have not been taught already. In a way, this would be
similar to an animal learning a conditioned response to seeing a particular
configuration of lines and arcs.  Imagine, if you will, a rat who is trained
to press a lever when it sees the word-shape "PRESS" light up on a screen.
Or, for example, I'm sure that you could learn to associate a word-shape in,
say, Arabic script with the sound of the word, but without understanding the
compositionality of the symbols, you are not really reading.  You might as
well be sounding out the word in English.

In this sense, the pros would not include learning to read or expanding
vocabulary (in any real sense), but the cons might include thinking your
baby can read already and not bothering to teach reading the harder way.
However, your baby will have learned a neat party trick, which is still very
impressive.

Regards,

Peter Gordon


Peter Gordon, Associate Professor
Biobehavioral Sciences Department
Teachers College, Columbia University
525 W 120th St. Box 180
New York, NY 10027

E-mail: pgordon at tc.edu
Phone:  212 678-8162 (Office)
        212 678-8169 (Lab)
        212 678-8233 (Fax)

Webpage: http://www.tc.edu/faculty/index.htm?facid=pg328









On 2/28/10 4:53 PM, "Liz P." <lizspeedvelmag at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Everybody,
> I have a 16 month old baby girl, and i just recently acquired the Your
> Baby Can Read Program, but when i started watching it, it seems too
> good to be true, and i was asking my Language Acquisition professor
> and she suggested that i inquire within to see if anyone knows the
> research behind this program and if there are any down falls or
> reasons why i shouldnt continue with the program with my daughter. I
> can see the Pros (shell learn to read and expand her vocabulary) but
> what would the Cons be. Thank you so much for your time. Any comments
> will be appreciated
> 
> Liz Pattison

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