HARDER THAN IT LOOKS
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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Subject 046M, for male, was seated nervously across from me at the table, his hands clasped tightly together in his lap. He appeared to have caught an incurable case of the squirms. I resisted the urge to laugh, and leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. “Today, we’re going to play a game with Mr. Moo” —I produced an inviting plush cow from behind my back. “Can you say hi to Mr. Moo?”
In the Stanford lab I work in with Professor Michael Ramscar, we study how children go about what is arguably the most vital project in their career as aspiring adults—learning language. Over the last several years, we’ve been particularly taken with the question of how kids learn a small, but telling piece of that vast complex: color words. We want to know how much they know, when they know it, and whether we can help them get there faster.
046M was off to a good start. I arranged three different color swatches in front of him. “Can you show me the red one?” He paused slightly, then pointed to the middle rectangle: red . “Very good!” I said, beaming. “Now, what about the one that’s blue?”
The test was not designed to trip kids up. Far from it—we only tested basic color words, and we never made kids pick between confusable shades, like red and pink. To an adult, the test would be laughably easy. Yet, after several months of testing two-year olds, I could count my high scorers on one hand. Most would fail the test outright. 046M, despite his promising start, proved no exception.
Before the test would begin, the child’s parents were told that today we would be testing color words. Responses were typically enthusiastic. “Oh, that’s great! Margie’s got her colors down pat.” At which point, we leveled with them: if they wanted to sit through the study, they would have to be blindfolded. Such measures may seem extreme—but then again, so were the reactions we got from parents during the pilot study, as they watched their little ones fail to pick out the right color, over and over again. The reactions ran the short line from shocked to terrified, and back again. Some parents were so dismayed they started impatiently correcting their children mid-test. One mother, in particular, couldn’t seem to stop herself, and took to nervously grabbing her little boy’s hand whenever it veered away from the correct choice.
Then, inevitably, would come the post-test breakdown: “Is my child colorblind?”
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55 Comments
Add CommentBest skip the phrasing in that last sentence too. Young children are also surprisingly bad at understanding relative clauses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs this only because this is a learning phase for the child, do you think this logic applies when adults speaking in different languages try to communicate with one another. I guess what I am trying to ask is whether this is a learning phase thing or is it something about the developmental stage of the child, the development of his/her brain?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you think this is specific to children learning languages or could it also apply to adults learning a language or trying to communicate in a foreign language? Is it something about the development stage of the brain or is it a general principle of learning?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe use of colors prenominally is not an universal use of the language; so the unique improvement exposed in this article gets invalidated in the means of brain science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe it was found that some phrase constructions are clearer for toddlers, far away from the purpose of this study.
Surprisingly this article first commented that color learning has a lot of parameters involved, but finally only gets improved one part of the process for one specific language. Spanish and mandarin kids may show that color naming is commonly more difficult than other language skills, but language consructions are different.
The good news is, our grandkids will all be speaking Spanish anyway so they'll be great with naming their colors at an early age.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this/ kidding
I have one key question: Who cares if a child can name their colors at age 2? How does this benefit a childs cognition, social skills, or anything else thats important for a pre-schooler? Toddlers should be hard at work at imaginative play and parents should be engaging, talking, and reading to their youngstersnot sitting down to quiz them about color names (or caring if they get them wrong). I find it sad that any parent would want to make your two-year old the color-naming talk of the party. This same parenting approach launched a billion dollar Baby Einstein business (also sad). The whole premise of this research is that faster equals better. Really? Are you sure? Im not. Raising a child is not a game of one-upmanship with the neighbors, with the goal to parrot facts and fractions by pre-K. Theres a lifetime of that coming, my children. Now is the time to be free to play and scribble outside the linesin any color.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat's "burnt umber?" Or "olive drab?" I once had a car that was "Malaga red." We have far too many names for colours.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm with tret. So what? How important is it that children learn the names for colors 6 or 12 months earlier than they might otherwise?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can see how this kind of thing is useful to know in communicating with toddlers. It's like avoiding the word "don't" once you know that toddlers can't always understand don't commands. That's useful. Knowing that they're paying more attention to the nouns and verbs and that the meaning they place on other words in a sentence depends on those words' place in the sentence can be useful. But how important is it, really, that we shortcut the learning process?
@tret & @zusana: spoken like people who don't have kids.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would say it's spoken like someone who doesn't see children's learning as a contest. Children learn best (and, hold the information long-term much better) when we wait until they're ready to learn something, rather than push them according to some arbitrary schedule.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy husband and I (it was his idea) taught our son the color words in as many days as we had words to teach. We had a green day, blue day, etc. On the green day, for instance we could only play with green toys, eat green food and wear green clothes! It got to be a challenge on blue day because there are very few blue foods. But food coloring goes a long way towrd this end. Food coloring was also used for the blue bath and after the bath, the resulting blue body.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was seriously fun and our son caught on very quickly and joined in the game.
How children go about learning is critical. The article deals with one aspect and points to a methodology for teaching children in general, by reference to the one type of learning - color words. This is useful information, with perhaps many implications for other types of learning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClearly the references in the article to things like having your 2 year old be the color-naming hit of the party are meant to be humerous. We all know parents that are a bit extreme and seem to living their lives through their little genius.
There is nothing in the article that suggests that "engaging, talking, and reading to youngsters" is not important. Quite the opposite. If we as parents understand that there are better ways to engage, talk and read and play,etc., we will use those methodologies. Most of us do this to teach our children about the world so they can fully engage in all that is delightful and noticeable - like color.
I loved the comment about blue days and green days - when my kids were little I took them in the stroller around the neighborhood and named everything and identified aspects of things. I really don't remember how I tried to teach color. My goal wasn't to create geniuses, it was to have fun and teach so my children could communicate and interact.
Melody Dye! "Dye", get it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be much more natural to let our toddlers EAT fruit and vegetables in all their colours - after all, this food interest was at the very beginning of our colour experience, as evolutionary anthropologists have pointed out; and, whether we want to know it or not, we do owe our 3D colour trichromacy to our primate ancestors' fruit & berry picking in the trees! Colour pigments mean healthiness, thanks to their antioxidants, for both plants and animals , including us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPriming our children on synthetic colours on inedible objects like crayons is crazy. Feeding them fast food dyed with coal-tar derivatives borders on child abuse, as it conditions the child to go for junk food from an early age, with all health consequences.
For a realistic approach to colour learning, googlers are invited to: Colour Eating without Heating . Youthevity.com
Thanks Ductape Fairy! :) Actually, spoken like a parent who supports this research (in that it offers insight into language acquisition), but feels like the article plays on parental insecurities and promotes neurotic parenting (do we need more of that?). Although passing this test (in my opinion) is unimportant for a 2-year-old, parental reaction is cited as thus "...as they watched their little ones fail to pick out the right color, over and over again. The reactions ran the short line from shocked to terrified, and back again." Nowhere does this article state that it's perfectly normal for a toddler not to know their colors, and that it's unnecessary-and possibly a bad idea-to get out the flash cards so that your child can "catch up."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a single dad raising a toddler on my own, I have to say I to agree with Tret and Zuz. I'm constantly bombarded with parents who are so fixated on issues such as colour recognition, or other "milestones" that it just seems to be like a submergence in a neurotic hailstorm. Honestly, I let my son roam and find things that HE is drawn to. There is NO shortage of questions that HE comes up with for me; in fact, it's a constant stream of "daddy - whats this? whats that? why? why? why?" The end result seems to be that his knowledge set thus far is robust and diverse, especially compared to some of the poor kids I know who's "milestone" obsessed parents have prevented from learning simple independent abilities such as how to figure out complex devices (computers, etc). I figure: the human organism innately wants to learn and know, at least in childhood. Why would I hinder my son's innate love for knowledge by associating this drive with negative stimuli (such as my own neurosis?).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyways, interesting read nonetheless for offering insight into something I'd never really considered (although I was never really worried about whether or not he learned his colours rapidly in the first place)...
Ryan
@Snidga: Actually, as adults, the opposite is true. For instance, if I say to you, "Can you please hand me the blue sweater?" using "blue" immediately narrows the scope of what I'm talking about, and helps you quickly pick out what I want. The problem for kids, is that they don't know what "blue" means yet, so it's not focusing their attention in that way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInterestingly, we've already done an experiment in adults looking at whether these ordering effects matter when they're learning novel color categories (i.e., learning to carve up the color spectrum in a totally new way, with new words). We've found that it does -- indeed, we get the exact same effect we get with kids (the paper is called "Surprise in the Learning of Color Words").
The issue at stake in our research, is how we can better organize information in language to facilitate learning. If youre interested in how learning interacts with cognitive development, I have another Mind Matters post discussing just that: The Advantages of Being Helpless.
@David N'Gog, @GPu: You both are definitely right to point out that color words are not universally used prenominally -- French and Spanish are two obvious examples. When we were preparing this work for publication, we actually looked to see whether comparative studies on color learning had been done in this domain, and found that they hadn't. That would definitely be interesting follow-up work. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that languages such these often do something called "noun drop." For example, while in English I would say "pass me the red cup," in French, I could get away with simply "pass me the red." So even languages that use postnominal constructions aren't necessarily optimal for color learning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@tret I completely understand where this reaction comes from, and share similar feelings about programs like "Baby Einstein," and competitive pre-K programs. But I should clarify: the aim of our research program is not to make kids faster, it's to make learning *easier.* That making learning easier may, in turn, make kids clear difficult learning hurdles at an earlier age, is an outcome that some parents may find desirable. But we're not studying language learning simply in hopes of producing wunderkids ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen it comes to color learning, what we've found is that using color words prenominally simply isn't giving children much (if any) useful information about color. This means that in everyday speech, we're actually stacking the decks against our kids learning color.
To give an illustrative example: imagine that you were a principal, trying to decide between two prospective teachers for a new kindergarten. Their skill-set and experience were roughly comparable, but one was soft-spoken and often mumbled, while the other was clearly articulate and spoke so that she could be heard by all around her. Which would you hire? The point is that, while they might be delivering the same content, the mode of delivery matters. In the case of color learning, the difference between prenominal and postnominal usage is probably more extreme than this example even suggests: our research indicates that if we only ever used colors in prenominal constructions, children would never learn color categories accurately.
Then again, your (and other parents') reaction against the "milestone" obsession hits the mark. In the lab I work in, my "Nancy Drews" can often predict which children will max out the baseline tests (whether it be for color, number, etc), simply based on how verbally engaged their parents are with them. Typically, the more engaged the parent, the better the kid performs, and the less likely we are to end up with a nailbiting response from the parent when the kid misses a question :)
@Polly Outlaw What a fantastic idea! That seems like a great way of solving the problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@rhodinsthinker You actually raise an interesting point. In theory, languages could divide up the color spectrum in nearly endless ways -- your average adult can perceptually discriminate between over 2 million different shades of color. However, most languages only have a few words to distinguish between a relative handful of broad color categories. So, while you can (perceptually) tell that cardinal looks different from scarlet, unless you’re an artist or a color enthusiast you probably won’t be able to accurately pick them out by their names—instead, you’ll simply call them both “red.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile we have words in our language for "olive drab" and "burnt umber," they're far, far less frequent than "green" and "brown." (According to Google, "burnt umber" is actually about 2,000 times less frequent than "brown") That suggests that even though we have the words to make these distinctions in our language, very few people are actually making them. For most people, they're more like what "blue" is to your average two year old -- an empty descriptor.
I don't have a good memory of my childhood, nor is my Chinese very good.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat said, I don't remember ever having trouble with colors. It's likely because Chinese was my first language, and in Chinese, the phrasing is something like "Red's balloon." The color becomes somewhat possessive, and treated like a noun.
It'd be interesting to see the study repeated with other languages.
There's a language just over the border from England, namely Welsh, that uses the same word -- "glas" -- for green, blue, and certain shades of gray. Perhaps the original meaning was "sea color" since that range of colors would be a good descriptor of the seas around Britain. Does anyone know?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have no idea whether I could tell colors apart at age 2 but I certainly could push a pencil and draw well by age 5 (my mother saved some of those drawings). Along with other grade school pupils I was sent to short courses at the Chicago Art Institute when I was 7 and 8. We worked with art crayons and art pastels and when I started using oil paints, in 9th grade, I already knew yellow ochre, burnt sienna, viridian--and all the weird ones as well as the vivid spectrum hues. That came from daily exposure to pastels and crayons with those names printed on them. The only color I've never been able to visualize is "puce"! I guess we didn't use it in art classes. Ot maybe it's because "puce" sounds so yucky?
In the French language, typically, adjectives are placed after nouns, for example 'le ballon rouge'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould the researcher who wrote this article be willing to research if French toddlers are better at learning the names of the colors they discern? If so it would definitely validate the premise, observations and assertions of this article, if not... the assertions would not pass the falsifiability test.
(Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or by a physical experiment. From Wikipedia.)
Actually I think the semantics of colour in Welsh have become more or less the same as those of English.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Glas" seems to corresond to English "blue", except for some restricted, idiomatic usages.
i completely agree - sad to think that so much focus is on stuffing more "knowledge' into children at an ever earlier age...no wonder people loose touch with themselves, their fellow human beings & nature around them. i'd love to see stanford research potential focused on issues more relevant to the well-being of all
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat I really want to know about color terminology is why so many English-speakers say that a child can name "her colors" or "his colors" (instead of simply saying that the child can name colors). What does it mean when native speakers of English add a possessive to these phrases -- how does "naming your colors" differ from simply "naming colors"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm red-green color-blind, and have always felt that I was never properly taught the colors and that exacerbated the problems already present due to color-blindness. And I wonder if color-blind people might be helped by color training as adults?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to be a "shorthand" for "knowing the [something] that he/she is expected to know". We use exactly the same expression with other knowledge that is normally expected of children: "Now I'll sing my ABC's", and "Tommy hasn't learned his multiplication table yet."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a somewhat rarer , and older, usage of this form with the kind of knowledge that was expected of the average adult person at one time: "he really knows his Bible," for example.
Parents usually (in my experience) teach their children to name the colour of objects, not to pick out objects of a named colour which would have been entirely new and novel to the two year olds tested, which is probably why they were so easily confused. Had they asked the children to name the colour of particular objects (presented as object then colour ie postnominally) the results would probably have been quite different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid the researchers check to see if children were taught to pick out coloured objects or just to name the colour of objects? Probably not.
I wish I could relate the abuse heaped upon me by my early teachers. Learn your colors! Your not applying yourself. You'll never amount to anything in this life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDrivel. Idiot teachers.
I've known since later than that, that I AM red-green-pastel colorblind. If fact, many real careers are blocked to me because of it.
But, until I discovered my colorblindness in the 7th grade, it was PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS who made my life hell.
Oh, so you know, I'm 62 this year. I still remember the scorn they heaped on my deadbeat ass.
@Robert Karl Stonjek Your comment actually raises a really interesting point: The reason that many of the parents in our pilot study were so shocked when their kids failed our color test, is because children at that age often appear to grasp color. Indeed, as you suggest, many toddlers are capable of using and responding to color words in everyday contexts, such as "yellow banana" or "blue sky." Many can even respond to familiar questions, like "What color is a tomato?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere this gets really fascinating, however, is that blind children at that age can do the same thing. It turns out that children (sighted or not) can learn that the word "green" goes with words like "grass," whereas the word "blue" goes with words like "sky," simply by listening to how people commonly use these words in speech (That is, if you hear the word "sky" you're a lot more likely to hear the word "blue" in close proximity, as opposed to "green"). This can give parents the misleading impression that their children actually know which hues green and blue pick out.
What we were looking at in our study is not whether or not two year olds could name the colors of familiar objects (like a red firetruck, a yellow banana, or a blade of green grass). It was whether they could name colors independent of context, and thereby demonstrate knowledge of color categories.
The question remains: is there a difference between their (two year olds) ability to pick out an object of a particular colour, like a red pen from a selection of pens, verses their ability to name the colour of a pen?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe colour association is another interesting dimension, as you mentioned. Note that in a case studied by and written about by Oliver Sacks, an individual who lost colour vision after a stroke gradually lost the ability to associate colours with objects, so when asked, he might say that bananas are red.
@tedtoal The good news is that the results of our adult study suggest that color categories can be learned through adulthood. For the colors on the spectrum that you are able to perceptually discriminate, you might try a simple learning game with a friend.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor training in our study, we used six different sets of familiar objects (unfamiliar objects were reserved for testing), with each object in three different colors. So for example, we might have a cup in red, yellow, and blue. In the training that proved helpful to the kids, we would show them an object and then say "This crayon is red" or "This cup is blue" (and so on). We would do this for all the objects, but we would change up which kind of object we used on each trial (crayon on one, cup the next). This kind of training might be a bit boring as an adult, but maybe you could think of some creative objects to make it fun :) To track your progress, just make sure you test yourself with objects you didn't train on.
There's also a great "Mind Matters" post by Roddy Roediger and Bridgid Finn called "Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips On How To Learn" that might provide some other useful learning strategies to employ in practicing.
Teaching a child color names gives them another tool to communicate. The sooner they learn these things, the better. People who object to this are reacting to problems in their own upbringing. They shouldnt try to lay trips on young people. It doesnt hurt a child to learn things.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTeaching a child color names gives them another tool to communicate. The sooner they learn these things, the better. People who object to this are reacting to problems in their own upbringing. They shouldn’t try to lay trips on young people. It doesn’t hurt a child to learn things.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm a little curious as to the long term impact of making learning abstract concepts such as color categorizing easy will have on brain and problem solving development. Your reseach makes it clear that designating hues out of context is pretty challenging.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we make these things easy will it decrease the ability to tackle complex challenges later in life? Will it make it easier for the person to re-arrange complex problems into new formats that make them easier to solve?
We all know that parents that view their children as extensions of themselves tend to be abusive and obnoxious. They are also easily victimized by scams such as the Baby Einstein brain damaging program that has been proven to decrease intelligence (re: Baby Doofus article, don't remember issue #). The question I have regarding that is at what point do you intend to market this as an income producing product? If you don't then some dirtbag will. Better to have someone that understands the real impact than some shyster that only cares about money.
I hope to read a lot more on this research. I have 1 son that is learning disabled and another that is gifted so learning and brain function are very important to me.
My youngest daughter could distinguish between purple, lavender and violet about 6 months earlier than the average kid. I was quite impressed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow at age 13, she routinely calls lavender purple and vice verse. Go figure.
here,here
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@bucketofsquid I definitely think these are open questions, and I wouldn't want to venture a definite answer without having more empirical evidence. However, what I can say is that there's a growing body of research showing that children's verbal ability at around age four is highly predictive of what their vocabulary will be at eighteen; whether they'll go to college; even what their adult salary will be. And while there are definitely some genetic / biological factors that come into play in determining how fast children learn, it's also clear that the exposure they get to language plays a huge role (i.e., how many words they hear heavily influences how many words they know). As I'm sure you know -- as a parent -- it's not simply the case that you can have a child, largely ignore her for a couple years, and she'll hit age five at the same competence level as a child with highly engaged parents or siblings (all other things being equal). So -- clearly, a lot of what's going on in the first couple years of life matters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA lot of the reason we do the research we do, is because we want to develop methods for teaching children who may not benefit from as much linguistic exposure as others. For example, with color -- let's say that the average child needs 100 helpful exposures to "blue" to learn what it means. In English, color words are used postnominally only about a third of the time. This means that overall, children are getting input they can learn from relatively rarely. Of course, while this stacks the odds against learning color, it doesn't make it impossible; if the child hears "blue" used 300 times, odds are, she'll know what it means. But now let's look at what this means: if we have Family A, who talks constantly to their kid, it may only take two years for her to hear "blue" (postnominally) that many times. But in Family B, who doesn't talk to their kid much, it might take six years for her to get that much exposure, which will substantially delay her color learning. But now let's say someone taught Family B this trick, and even though they didn't talk much to their daughter, when they did, they talked in a helpful (postnominal) way. This will mean that the little girl from Family B should learn just as fast as the one from Family A. Even though she's only getting a fraction of the exposure as Family A's kid, the exposure she's getting is what she needs to learn. The simple idea being that, while "shortcutting" development may not be so important for children who get massive amounts of input from their parents and educators, it should be critical for children where that's not the case. And I would imagine that the same goes for a kid who struggles with learning disabilities, who may need more helpful input to learn from than the average kid.
(The general question is -- why wouldn't we want to make learning as easy as possible for children?)
Anyhow -- this color work is the most recent research we've published, but we've also looked at techniques for helping children stop over-regularizing nouns and verbs (a lot of toddlers will say things like "mouses" instead of "mice") and for helping them rapidly advance in number learning. Both of those papers are currently under review. If you're curious to know more, I would encourage you to contact me or Prof Ramscar by email :)
Should you start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” I am not in the least apt to begin discretely looking around for it: I would start a continuous search.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps a discreet one.
How do two-year-old children who speak languages which use postnominal adjectives, like spanish does, score in these tests?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@rhodinsthinker, far too many words for animals too, we should just call them animals, and we can just call all plants, plants and everything else things. Perhaps that is too many words for you too. Clearly the notion of applying labels to distinct concepts is lost on you. There are other members of the great ape family that don't use confusing words. Perhaps you are just hanging with the wrong one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou could also do this test with children that speak other languages, like Spanish. We say "el globo rojo", which should make it easier for them to learn the color and would confirm your hypothesis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnrique Garc�a Corona
engarcia@alum.mit.edu
Mexido City
I'm not a teacher,but have worked as a teacher in various countries in Asia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen teaching colours (to 4 year olds) l would get them to draw a square in a chosen colour then write the word that represented the colour in the same colour,this seemed to work.
I suspect you are of the male gender. There is a distinct difference in colour naming based on gender.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@SpoonmanWoS: I agree with tret and zusana and I'm a mom. There are many kids who are very oriented toward pleasing the adults in their lives, who will bend to those adults' will, and who will grow up to be miserable, other-directed adults. Developing a whole child -- one who has skills such as knowing colors AND who has a strong inner character -- is not easy. It's a delicate interplay that takes place every day, in every interaction, for years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy parents did well I think: two of their three children are entrepreneurs running their own businesses and providing employment for others. For the most part, my parents were light on pushing in our younger years and heavier as we got older, with a selected focus on being a productive member of society. I don't recall them ever using us as party tricks.
However, I can see the usefulness of shortcuts and efficiency if one is attempting to care for 30+ kindergarteners when many have come from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, some of the people that I have met through the Literacy Volunteers literally have no reading material in their homes -- not even a free newspaper or a People magazine. So, the first time that their children see letters on a page is in Kindergarten. It reminds me to be thankful for how wealthy my family is just to have SciAm in our home!
Any idea if kids speaking a romance language (where adjectives typically follow the noun) would do better on the initial tests?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf your child can't name colors at the age of 2, just relax. He / she will pick it up when it's actually needed. The ability to name colors does not improve your child's world, only yours. Your child has plenty of better things to do (playing) rather than satisfying your need to outperform your peers at dinner parties.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving said that though very interesting article about how children's minds work!
I agree with the poster who said that learning colors gives the child another tool to communicate. Our 21 month old son is better at using colors to say what he wants (blue, red, orange, brown, yellow, purple) than name. For example, he cannot yet say fork, cup, blanket, jacket, but he will say the color of the object he wants and point in the direction. It definitely helps us know what he wants. Seems like kids pick things up at their own pace, and - the way his language skills are - color definitely is easier for him to verbalize than some of the object names.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell said.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Moo is a male cow?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisha ha... and after all that they've got to understand:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I'm feeling blue"
"It's a grey area"
"I try to be green"
"Black Wednesday"
"It came out rosy"
"He was whiter than white"
"I saw red"
poor kids.
Well, this article motivated me to write an app for kids to learn color names.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy app announces color names in many languages (also a cool way to teach a second language!) using the iPhones camera. "Color Genius".
Sorry for the advert... delete if inappropriate.
Have you tried to compare kids speaking a Germanic language (as English) with kids speaking a Romance language?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRomance languages usually place the adjective after the noun...
If what you say is true, a French, Italian, Spanish, etc. child should learn colours faster than an English or German one.