6 thoughts on “Sunday Open Thread….it’s been a while”

    1. A living wage reflecting the value of increased productivity of somewhere around $23/hr might allow a parent to stay home with their child long enough to converse about anything, and cut back from 80 hours a week to maybe 50 if they have a job.

      Have You Phoned Your Republican State Legislator to tell them anything lately? (Posed to the whole audience Ed, not just you)

  4. Ed,
    Great article. I came across this study during the Mayor’s Challenge – I almost voted for it, but in the end voted for Milwaukee. 🙂

    What I was hoping to find in the study but didn’t (and that’s not a criticism of it) were a number of factors that I would have found of interest. Primarily, documenting not only word counts, but the variety of speech patterns in the home. I didn’t read the embedded study intently, I only skimmed it about half way through so some of what I question may have been addressed but it didn’t seem so.

    There are scientific studies out there on some of these matters. I simply haven’t sought ought them all out as rigorously as I should. Namely:

    A multilingual home. I may have missed it in the study summary, but it seemed as if the study measured only spoken English.

    How many hours spent reading to the child. As important, the level of complexity or sophistication of the works read.

    Spoken poetry – How many homes routinely played recorded poetry read by authors or others. As important, which poets? I don’t have any evidence to back this claim, but I suspect absorbing cadence of speech (varieties of) is as important to language development and internalizing language structure as is vocabulary.

    That brings to mind music in the home. Is music played live or recorded or at all? What kinds of music – instrumental, lyrical or a combination? Again, I didn’t look for data on this, though I’m sure the data is out there. I’ve come across it before. Early exposure to certain kinds of music impacts language development and a child’s ability to master language. I think that measurement would have been an interesting factor to examine in the study.

    Are there any kinetic components intervening language/vocabulary acquisition?

    The developing brain is an intensely fascinating matter. Sadly, lack of beneficial stimuli in the critical early childhood years can never be compensated for in later years. Even though I didn’t vote for the Rhode Island study in the Mayor’s Challenge. Now, I’m glad it won. Thanks for posting the article.

  5. nonquixote,
    You couldn’t be more spot on with your observation about wages and parenting. Excellent point.

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