Posted on 07/16/2012 11:35:40 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Edited on 07/16/2012 11:40:25 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The company that persuaded hundreds of thousands of parents to buy Your Baby Can Read products is going out of business, citing the high cost of fighting complaints alleging its ads were false.
Your Baby Can LLC announced the decision on its website.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
The first time your baby asks you to explain any provocative billboard in a major metropolitan area, you will reconsider the entire enterprise.
Some babies are smarter than others. Also, many young parents cannot actually .... well ... read. So, they haven't a prayer of using the program.
That be capitalism.
I sent my kid to the Evelyn Woodhead Sped Reedin Korse.
The idea and logic of “your baby CAN read” (not ‘will’, definitely, just ‘can’) is built on a few already achieved understandings about human language skills.
Humans - infants and children - have language skills earlier than do they have the skill to speak - which involves certain physical changes and mastery of the voice, not just ‘mental’ ability.
Humans are able to learn and recognize the meaning of sounds communicated to them - “NO!!!!” - much sooner than they can speak. Mastery of understanding what is meant by a spoken word demonstrates that the skill to recognize an idea through symbols is already there (symbolism - a sound we make in speech is but a sound-symbol for an idea).
Humans can identify symbols that they are taught are attached to either words (sounds) or ideas, earlier than they can speak. It has been shown that “baby’s” ARE able to learn a small dictionary of symbols from “American Sign Language” earlier than they they will speak. (in the last five years, babies among my relatives have done so).
So, both symbols and sounds can be learned and applied (by the human brain) for communication in a time frame that is possible to achieve before the ability to speak takes hold.
It is certainly “possible”, with training (when the spelling of the word “cat” is always shown along with the image of a cat and the sound of the word cat), and “reading ability” (recognizing the word symbols identified with an image) to begin (rudimentary) even before normal speech does.
Regardless, the obviously well funded advocacy group that filed the complaint with the FTC had deep enough pockets to damage the finances of the company. Too bad.
I was thinking of, "Your Baby Can Make Up Words That Only He Understands."
Thank you for your post 21. Sorry to be so tardy in responding. I just now signed back on again.
That’s a fascinating story about the dog “reading” an instruction. They are fascinating creatures, aren’t they? Our two provide Mrs. OP and me with enormous pleasure. I cannot imagine a world without them.
“A much simpler business model would be Yo Chile Ignerint.”
Too late, public schools have been working that one for years.
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