to think that babies grow up automatically..

[seeker]

...and many parents waste huge amounts of time, energy, tears and stress and make themselves very unhappy trying to teach them to do things that they will do naturally because that's what they are programmed to do?

SuchProspects, the findings in the study related to quantity of language exposure not quality of vocabulary. Precisely, the findings were related to talking more to children. Quantity of language exposure vs language complexity was found to be a key predictor of later academic success.

This is not quite the same as the "elaborated" and "restricted" codes that you mention (Bettelheim's work), which was rubbish in terms of linguistic skills - referring only to the type of register used e.g. standard vs nonstandard English. This is not about how language is used, per se. This is about basic labelling skills e.g. flower, car, brush, sweeping etc, not "armadillo" and "chameleon".

Of course there is a cycle of poverty that contributes to ongoing disadvantage and language poverty is part of this. However, many of the children I am talking about are speech and language delayed e.g. not speaking at 2 or 2.5 but then developing along normal lines with a boost on nursery entry etc.

I have no doubt that there is a social and political reality that the prioritisation of verbal communication serves to disadvantage and disenfranchise the poor in our society - but that doesn't disprove the fact that the quantity of linguistic input you receive in the early years impacts upon your developmental trajectory. All our experiences do. If you have repeated experiences in your early years to do with just about anything it will affect and shape your response to that stimuli and language experiences can be individual in a way that motor experiences are less so. If I am, say, a butterfly keeper it is highly likely my children will know a great deal about butterflies. Another child may never have seen one. In contrast, the development of sitting and walking are more intrinsic and less likely to be impacted upon by experiences (though obviously if you spend your life strapped into a buggy that may have an impact on your muscle strength).

The prevailing theory of early child development at present is "neurodevelopmental" in which genetic predispositions interact with stimuli in the environment to shape an individual child's developmental trajectory - experience altering the interaction of neurons in the brain.

It's nature and nurture, essentially.

Working This is a bit of an aside, I think we are both saying that speech delay isn't simply about talking to your kids more and that most kids learn language by being spoken to.

But I thought one of the criticisms of the Hart and Risley work was that they looked at quantity of language exposure but didn't measure the parents' vocabulary (and their methodology for measuring vocabulary was, in any case, somewhat flawed). Is that not the case?

Another thing that hasn't been mentioned (and is probably as aside, but anyway), is that some children have excellent understanding of language, but simply have trouble articulating words.

DS1 is 3.4 and understands very complex instructions (have been told above his age by SALT), but limited (albeit increasing) vocabulary and poor pronounciation.

If exposure to language is critical to language development, how can this contradiction exist?

In other words, if my sons language exposure has been limited (and attributable to his speech delay), surely his understanding would also be limited?

Sheeplikessleep" - no, because in your son's case, his difficulties are not attributable to language exposure. The interaction is between what a child can* do (their basic abilities) and what happens around them. Often, children with significant gaps between their understanding and spoken language/speech have underlying difficulties that prevent them from gaining maximum benefit from general language models around them e.g. working memory issue that mean they can't hold onto words in their memory long enough to extract ALL the information they need to be able to understand, use and articulate the word. Or they may have a motor issue that means that articulating the word is hard which then reduces their access to this word in spoken language. It's a complicated, individual thing.. so they may need an altered input e.g. to listen to the differences between sounds at an individual level or practice these sounds at an individual level to help their developing linguistic systems.

SuchProspects, I am a bit ambivalent about the Hart and Risley study - I think it probably is ethnocentric and its methodology was overly behavioural/simplistic/too small a sample size.

However, all research can be criticised and the reality is that any of us working with poorer students in educational settings can see pretty clearly massive differences -between the language and communication of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds that effectively lock poorer children out of learning and contribute to the cycle of disadvantage. Yes, there are undoubtedly broader issues at work here with reference to how the curriculum is structured in such a way that it denies the experiences and communication styles of the many to give preference to the few... but what I am faced with on a daily level is kids who just can't access the language of the curriculum at all and even if this reflects some grand sociopolitical truth about the disenfranchisement of the poor, my job is to help them understand those words and sentence structures so that they can actually participate in their day to day lives/acquire skills that society deems valuable in the workplace. Does this mean teaching poor kids how to understand and use middle class language? In our current context, probably.

The kids I work with obviously have other issues.. bigger fish to fry.. but when observing in regular lessons I see bright kids who have difficulties repeating words like atmosphere and metamorphosis because they are taught rapidly and without linking them to a student's prior knowledge base so their representation of the word is fuzzy. They are culturally decontextualised which means they are linguistically hanging out there on a limb and even those children who remain motivated in the context of an uninspiring curriculum with no relevance to their own cultural identity struggle to do something as basic as repeating the word.

If much of your language exposure at school bears no relevance to your experience or is pitched at a linguistic level which you have not had cause to develop at home, it is highly likely to make you zone out and reduce your participation in the language around you.. which will make it harder next school year when that language has become increasingly more decontextualised and irrelevant. For some students, I do believe this actually impacts upon their linguistic development because the time they could be spending engaging in any meaningful language activity (not just one deemed appropriate by a middle class person or Whitehall) is being wasted. Much as if a healthy person lies in bed for weeks, their muscles will waste...

I don't think it's as simple as some sociological commentators would have it, that there is no fall out from differences in exposure, it's just that people assessing them use middle class tools to judge and disempower them. My colleague who worked with a very poor, multiethnic inner city Youth Offending population used standardised assessments on all of them to establish a baseline, and found that about 70% scored well within normal limits on these measures even within a skewed population. So the tools must have some validity as a measure of language development, despite being perhaps too "middle class" in terms of some vocabulary items/structures. Why the rest of the sample scored below normal limits (when a middle class population would only have about 2-6% depressed scores) can't simply reflect ethnocentric bias. I'm not having it that working class people are simply "thick" so if it's not language/word choice and it's not underlying cognitive ability, there must be an environmental explanation.. I am happy for that to be that the educational system reduces opportunities for development as it is not culturally sensitive enough, but I am not happy to simply believe that if we all just try hard enough to be "right on" that the reality of educational and social disadvantage will disappear.

there is point trying to push a baby to do things its brain hasnt yet the capacity to do. i agree with you op

Oops, mistake with the bolding there - was just supposed to be "can".

YABTU if you think much happens automatically.

so very very much of human behaviour is learned. not weeing in the cave is learned.
speech is learned. the mode of behaviour to others is learned. reading and writing are learned. you may not remember learning them, this does not mean they aren't learned. It may be enough to learn these from watching others, from being in an environment where others do the above things - that may be sufficient for some children to get a grasp of what they should be doing.

For others, you have to make an effort, offer encouragement and support.

expecting children to have a magical internal undertanding of the world they are born into ignores that the mind of the newborn today is much the same as it was 10 thousand years ago - but the world has moved on.

If, on the other hand, you are merely getting annoyed with people pushing products and parenting theories, then knock yourself out. Be aware however that you probably - whether you recognise it or not - have absorbed some of somebodies parenting theory yourself.

I think that you are right in certain areas but children need to be socialised to behave in ways that their community thinks is acceptable.

Apart from that I think that what you fail to do is more important than what you do and the lack of those things can stunt a child's development - they need to be nourished, and shown affection and the positive attention of other people, and feel safe and happy. But to most reasonable people those things are a given - we don't need to be taught or sold them.

working9while5 - thank you for posting, useful information, thank you. i get so defensive sometimes when i see the whole 'talk to them and they will naturally talk back' comment so frequently seen. i also think our expectations of what is 'normal' development has become so competitive, that when one child is talking early, others try to do things (buy products, classes etc) because that timescale then becomes the norm.