Sunday, December 07, 2008

Brain tests show child wealth gap

2 comments:

John Powers said...

I found the results interesting, but was discouraged to see what I think is a canard: that poor kids aren't talked to enough. I'm not well studied in anything, but I studied child development in two bursts of academic effort in the mid 1970's and then in the mid 1980's. So there was a ten year gap in doing literature reviews. An enormous amount of literature came out of the premise that poor kids aren't talked to enough. Now there's twenty years since I've paid attention, but the data for that premise didn't seem solid when I was paying attention.

William Labov was influential in the development o sociolinguistics. There's a 1972 Atlantic article that provides a forceful take down of the verbal deprivation thesis.

I'm not sure what's going on in these EEG tests, but there's something strange about turning so quickly to this verbal deprivation thesis.

Scribe said...

Why don't people refer to Huxley & Brave New World as much as they do Orwell & 1984? The former is, in some ways, far more relevant to modern society than the latter. Increasingly so.