Remember BF Skinner's glass box? My idea is much less austere, and has good consequences. In order to foster brilliant children, as soon as "Bobby" is born, his parents place him in the Language Room: a play room with many hidden speakers. They slip in the CD "MetaWorld" a recording of 1,000 of the world's languages, where the speakers speak conversation, and also simply vocabulary. This is linked to a projector where pictures/situations match to the words being heard. In no time, young Bobby is multilingual. Upgrades come with even more languages.
-- benlevi7, Jan 13 2004

Speech Development http://www.nancydev...echDevelopment.html
"Do not rely on television to teach your children language. Besides not teaching good language skills, it can prevent children from ever learning to use language correctly." If television doesn't work, then this probably won't either. [kropotkin, Oct 04 2004]

When he begins talking the parents are going to have a hard time keeping up.....
-- normzone, Jan 13 2004


Would it come with 3 yr supply of Purrina Rat Chow?
-- sloopy, Jan 13 2004


The real question, reensure, is: is your dislike of Skinner genetic or enviromental?
-- theircompetitor, Jan 13 2004


Babies growing up in multilingual environments do indeed gain an excellent grasp of each (and achieve a skill of translation that no acquired-language translator can match), but on the other hand they also take longer to achieve proficiency in each. This holds true for trilingual too, I believe. So this kid might become the most accomplished linguist of the millennium, but he won't not start making coherent sentences until he's thirty-six.

As a disclaimer, this is, of course, the rule: geniuses are exceptions. Like UB's kids, probably. Hmm. When did your prodigy commence loquacity, UnaBubba?
-- nilstycho, Jan 13 2004


wow, I only have two laguages: English, and bad English. My kid may be screwed. :(
-- babyhawk, Jan 16 2004


//staff members//

Well that's one way to raise children to be sure... (!)
-- k_sra, Jan 16 2004


I'm not convinced that this would work. Language acquisition doesn't come from sitting passively and listening to speech. Even television isn't good for encouraging development of speech powers. Learning languages requires conversation and interaction with actual human beings. With this idea it's an open question whether you'd realise it was speech at all.
-- kropotkin, Jan 16 2004



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