31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Music Lessons Teach Children Emotional Nuance
10 years of music lessons
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry. The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all t... 1 
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notesChildren who begin music lessons before the age of seven have a greater ability to detect emotional nuance than children who do not.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Myth of the Educated Parent
Remarkably enough, the most obvious influence over children's language development turned out to be the mere amount of parents' talking; children whose parents addressed or responded to them more in early life had larger, faster-growing vocabularies and scored higher on IQ tests than children whose parents spoke fewer words to them overall. Parents who talk more inevitably expose their children to a greater variety of words and sentences, so a correlation also turned up between the diversity ...
1 Controlling for socioeconomic status does show that children whose parents are higher on the education ladder will have better grammar; however, parenting style is a much better predictor of a child's improvement than income.
