Word: wordsworth
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Every poetic career follows a different trajectory. Yeats’ style evolved and improved throughout his long career; Wordsworth composed his greatest works in his youth, but continued writing through his old age. The deterioration of poetic talent must be one of the greatest fears of an aging poet. Although Derek Walcott—who turned eighty this past January—is a Nobel Laureate and the author of over twenty published volumes of poetry, the dread of losing his poetic ability permeates “White Egrets,” his newest collection. He writes...
...question is, Do instructional DVDs actually help babies learn? To find out, researchers at the University of California at Riverside designed the most definitive study of the issue to date. The study used a DVD called Baby Wordsworth (part of the Baby Einstein series), which is aimed at teaching babies new vocabulary words, and assigned a group of 12-to-24-month-olds to watch it daily for six weeks. Turns out, the videos didn't work. There was no difference in language acquisition between children who were assigned to watch the DVD and a control group. (See pictures...
This time, psychologist Rebekah Richert and her team did those studies one better. She randomly assigned two groups of babies to either a Baby Wordsworth or control group, then carefully tracked how many of the 30 target words highlighted in the video the babies were able to learn. The words were those that children would commonly hear around the house, such as table, ball, piano, fridge and chair. Parents were asked to evaluate how many of these words their babies understood and how many they could speak, while toddlers were tested separately for their recognition of pictures associated with...
...parents. In Richert's study, her team found that the most learning occurred when parents directly taught children new words by pointing at an object, saying its name and repeating it. In the final session in the lab, the researchers observed parents and their youngsters as they watched Baby Wordsworth together; the children's ability to learn words in these situations was enhanced. "What we are finding in our study is that the DVD itself is not a substitute for that kind of live social interaction," says Richert. "For children under the age of 2, social interaction...
...Shopping here is not as dramatic as in a mall when everyone rushes in as soon as the door opens,” said Michelle Corliss, a staffer at Curious George Goes to WordsWorth. “Considering the circumstances, I think we are doing pretty well...