One of the more famous results in early-childhood research is that children who are spoken to more know more words, and children in families with highly educated parents get spoken to a lot more than children in families with less educated parents, and so cognitive inequality begins in infancy. But Bryan Caplan says that?s not the whole story:
Language fits a standard pattern. Consistent with your skepticism, upbringing has a noticeable effect on the vocabulary of�young�children. But as children mature, this effect largely fades away. The Colorado Adoption Project found, for example, that 2-year-olds adopted by high-vocabulary parents had noticeably larger vocabularies. But as the kids grew up, their vocabulary scores looked more and more like their biological parents?. By age 12, the effect of enriched upbringing on vocabulary was barely visible.
Admittedly, there?s a sense in which upbringing is all-important: If a baby is raised by wolves, he won?t know any words. (There?s also a sense in which genes are all-important: If you had wolf DNA, you wouldn?t know any words either.) But twin and adoption research focuses on questions that are much more relevant for parents: how your child will turn out if you switch to another parenting style.
That?s from his interview with David Leonhardt. The whole thing is worth a read. Also, here are 40 things Bryan Caplan believes on the day of his 40th birthday.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=fcf6043ec0d7937e3c4be7d915353bf7
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