{My thanks to Barbara Reynolds for bringing this to
my attention!}
The video series Your
baby can read, by Robert Titzer, appeared some years ago and is still being
sold on Amazon (where, to my incredulous amusement, it’s sold in the form of
CDs, “as seen on TV”, presumably by non-reading adults). Titzer has claimed
remarkable effects on early learning achieved by putting infants as young as
three months in front of a screen. By nine months, these children were supposed
to be able to read words-- a promise that
led to many purchases by parents who thought they were doing the right thing,
but a claim that had no evidence basis and indeed was contradicted by reliable
information.
Fortunately, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free
Childhood (www.commercialfreechildhood.org)
(the same group that fought “Baby Einstein”) went to work
against the sale of Your baby can read, and
now can celebrate success in getting rid of this material (and we’ll see how
soon Amazon drops it-- I notice that
they’re having a sale right now, a bit like the paint manufacturers selling off
the lead-based paint years ago).
It’s difficult to fight fraudulent commercial claims
in the United States, where commercial speech receives more legal protection
than it does in many parts of the world. However, in 2011, the Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and its attorneys filed a complaint with the
Federal Trade Commission on the ground that Your
baby can read was falsely marketed as educational for infants. In
particular, CCFC stated that there was no evidence that the program teaches
babies to read, or that there is a “window of opportunity” for learning to read
that closes at age 5 years or earlier, or that babies exposed to the Titzer
program do better than other children later in life. In 2012, a FTC decision
and settlement prohibited advertising that claimed any educational benefits for
the program, with a judgment of $185 million against the company. A final order
for the settlement was entered in the U.S District Court for the Southern
District of California last week.
What evidence would Titzer and his company have
needed to present in order to argue that their claims were not fraudulent?
Testimonials, of course, would not be sufficient, however enthusiastic they
were. Organizations like the American Psychological Association define
evidence-based treatments as those shown to be successful by specific types of
research; an adequate number of infants would have to be assigned randomly to a
group receiving the Your baby can read
package, or to a comparison group that did not receive it, and the Your baby group would have to show
statistically significant superiority over the other group on some measure.
What’s more, an independent researcher would need to replicate the study and
find similar results. Weaker types of research could be used to argue that the
claims were not fraudulent, under some circumstances, but Titzer appears to
have established neither strong nor weak evidence to support the claims he
made.
One of Titzer’s most questionable claims was about a
“window of opportunity” to learn to read quickly, which was said to close by
about age 5-- at about the same time
that most children begin the process of learning to read. It’s true that there
are “windows of opportunity” in the form of critical or sensitive periods,
during which certain aspects of development (e.g., binocular vision, learning
of the sounds characteristic of a language, or attachment to a familiar
caregiver) occur more readily than they would earlier or later in the
individual’s life. But reading obviously does not have a window of opportunity
in early life, or young children would learn to read very quickly simply as a
result of being read to or hearing adults read signs or other material out
loud. For some children, learning to read is not a genuine developmental possibility
until about age 8, and adults who have not been schooled learn to read when
given instruction, as we see from accounts of slavery in the U.S. and the
motivation of adult slaves to learn this forbidden skill.
Why can’t
babies read? There are a number of developmental steps that must be in place
before reading can be learned. In languages like English where speech sounds
(phonemes) are represented by letter shapes (graphemes), a new reader must
understand that connection and then learn the associations between specific
phonemes and graphemes. (And pity the poor reader of English, where several
different phonemes may be represented by a grapheme, or various graphemes may
work together or separately to represent a phoneme!) This connection cannot
possibly happen before the baby has learned, in the second half of the first
year, to realize that only the phonemes of its family’s language are part of
speech, and that all other “mouth noises” that humans can make should be
ignored while trying to understand speech--
that when people say “uh, mmm” or cough, those sounds don’t carry the
meanings that speech has. A baby who has not yet learned about phonemes can’t connect
speech sounds with graphemes.
Although babies can learn to recognize shapes, there
are some shape features of graphemes like those in our Roman alphabet that will
elude them for years to come. Even at kindergarten age, many children cannot
yet recognize that the orientation of a shape makes the difference between “b”
and “d”, or “p” and “b”, or between “g” and “q” in some type faces. They do not
“see letters backward” but have not reached the developmental milestone of
paying attention to right-left or up-down differences.
So, babies can’t learn to read, no matter what
methods we might try. And they already are busy with their own baby tasks which
must come before speaking and certainly before reading. Those tasks are ones
that babies do not learn from a screen, but do master as a result of looking at
and listening to smiling, playful, talking, singing caregivers, adults who
delight in the babies’ joyful responses to social fun. You can’t package the
experiences that help babies develop skills that will help them learn to read
with pleasure, when the time for reading comes.
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