LINGUAL SOPHISTICATION AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

[elleng]

“Linguistic Deprivation A book published in the 1990s famously stated that by the age of three, a child of low socioeconomic status will have heard thirty million fewer words than her wealthier neighbor. The authors posited a deficit in pre-age-three language foundation might account for the long-observed relationship between poverty and subaverage vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension.

In short, disadvantaged children entered their pre-K and kindergarten classrooms unready for school. While the existence of a word gap has been disputed, the link between socioeconomic status and language, literacy, attention, and academic achievement is not questioned.

And a staggering amount of research shows an impoverished upbringing can adversely and directly affect the brain. Childhood poverty has been linked to atypical brain structure, function, rhythm, and symmetry, 45 including reduced size of the hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and other brain structures important for memory, emotion, and organizing ourselves. 46”

— Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World by Nina Kraus

[Enter stage left]

1. So, my question is "what does this have to do with...

Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee?

[I_UndergroundPanther]

2. I grew up lower working class

But I could read at college level in the 3rd grade.

Actually started reading before kindergarten. I could write but it was sloppy as the motor skills were lacking. I have some art I did back then that had my writing on it at that age. In kindergarten the other kids figured out I could read. They asked me what does it say a lot.

Anyway my sisters taught me the alphabet,than how to read very young .

I attribute my being able to read so well to my sisters teaching me stuff.
Our house was big on books. We even had world book encylopedias
I got lots of joy reading those.

As for kids poor or middle class if thier siblings or an adult does not take time to teach them and make them curious they might have less interest in reading and learning stuff
They have a harder time of it.

[elleng]

3. 'Our house was big on books.'

[NJCher]

4. same here

My mother's favorite baby photo is me sitting in my high chair reading a book. I was a freakin' baby, for dog's sake. I had the book upside down, but hell yes, I was going to read.

You gotta' wonder where that kind of stuff comes from.

When I went to kindergarten and first grade, the books were about 20 pages long and thus very thin. My mother told me I wouldn't be seen carrying them to school. I had to carry a real book, one at least an inch thick.

Do you remember taking aptitude tests? We took numerous tests and what puzzled me is they wouldn't tell us how we scored. So I got a book about lock picking and picked the lock of the guidance counselor's office so I could get into my file. To this day I can still remember reading my scores out of that file.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

7. The testing was crazy.

I remember a monstrosity of a test it was a huge fucking test,it was the iowa test. It took days for us to finish that test.

[No Vested Interest]

5. Thoughts on early reading - not necessarily low income.

1. My second daughter taught herself to read at preschool age by reading cereal boxes. She could read in kindergarten. I felt first grade would be a waste of time, so sent her to private school second grade when public and parochial school wouldn't do it.

2. Deaf children must have a difficult time throughout life without hearing vocabulary. I notice that their written wording and sentence structure seems to be quite different from those in hearing world. (Have deaf niece and see her Facebook interactions with deaf friends.

3. Book programs like Dolly Parton's for children could be very helpful; also library story hours, etc. TV for preschoolers - Sesame Street, etc.

4. I used a program called Doman Delcado (I think- nearly 60 yrs ago.) which had large printed words placed through the home on objects - "door", "Window", "Chair", etc. The young child -beginning under one year- would associate the printed letters with the objects. Parent would say the word and point to the object and letters, etc. I gave the program up when third child arrived because I was too occupied with daily living.

[Midnight Writer]

6. It is this disparity in comprehension levels that is exploited by Frank Luntz and the GOP.

People comprehend language differently.

Many people pick up on key words and phrases that they recognize and totally miss any context or nuance.

As Frank titled one of his books, "It's Not What You Say, It's What They Hear". It is an instruction manual for inserting dog whistles and emotional trigger messages into communications.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

8. That book sounds interesting

I sometimes read nlp books and others in the same genra to learn how to avoid being manipulated by media,the net or in print etc..

[Igel]

9. Yet this research was a shock,

and replicated handily a fair number of times.

Produced an entire educational fad built on a false premise: If phonemic awareness is a good thing, teach it!

Except that it's emergent, and you can't teach it. You simply provide the right input and the little developing brains do their thing. But that didn't stop a lot of idjits from saying they were teaching it. What they were doing was teaching phonics (and testing phonics), and along the way using a lot of language around the disadvantaged tykes.

In other words, they weren't teaching PA, they were providing the right input. Krashen did a very nice meta-analysis of 300+ articles, and only two passed academic muster. One showed a slightly negative effect of trying to teach PA (in English), one showed a slightly positive one (in Hebrew). The rest lacked controls, didn't test what it claimed, had egregious errors in data analysis and sampling. But 300+ academics in schools of education got their wings for their hi kwalitee research.


The next big problem is teaching content versus process. It's unfashionable and very anti-Common-Core, but the biggest aid to understanding is knowing background knowledge about what's being said. Instead we have readings that kids really suck at because it's assumed they can read something on a topic they know nothing about and think critically about it. Enough research shows that's not happening--you take a PhD chemistry professor and a leading Critical Literary Theory scholar and give them problems and texts in history, chemistry, math, political science, English literature and you'll find that they have critical thinking skills roughly equivalent to a student in the last class those two scholars' took in those topics. Process requires a basis, it's not free-standing. (Which is exactly the point missed the pointless efforts to teach phonemic awareness.)