Your Baby Can Read?

This morning I turned on the Travel channel as I do nearly every morning, hoping to catch a show on China, and there was an infomercial on this early reading program called "Your Baby Can Read." Naturally, I went straight to my computer and Googled it to see what else I could find, even including the tag word "controversy." Oddly, there has been very little independent research done on this program, maybe because it is so new. However, the developer, Dr. Robert Titzer, supposedly used it on his daughter who is now a junior in college, so the research and development behind the program has been going on for some time.

The videos on the website are pretty impressive and I have to admit the principles behind the program are consistent with the research on brain development in very young children, however, I wonder if these results have more to do with behaviorist principles of reinforcement (baby says word, parents smile and give praise), and whole word recognition, than really being able to read. We still haven't resolved the whole word/phonemic awareness controversy. Titzer claims that children eventually learn phonemic awareness, but he doesn't say how this happens.
I know that Emma and Morgan both could recognize whole words pretty early on, but didn't recognize phonemes until this year in kindergarten ... still, I wonder if early literacy takes place much earlier than we think, and it just isn't reinforced in pre-school. There just isn't enough independent research on programs such as these to start implementing them in Head Start and early pre-school programs.

There may be some implications for multiple literacies ... does introducing so-called "academic" content as early as 9 months stifle a child's natural curiosity and creativity? Or, is this even an issue if the learning atmosphere is fun and the parent or caregiver is sensitive to the child's interest level? This program makes use of multiple sensory stimuli, and according to Dr. Titzer, the program helps the children to make connections between the visual, auditory and verbal information, which I will admit many other baby learning programs do not (such as BrainyBaby and Baby Einstein). Many developmental psychologists caution against letting children interact with "screen time," but I think this argument is more about the content of what is being watched, than the screen time itself. TV cannot just be used as a babysitter and parents/caregivers must interact with the baby. The multiple sensory stimulus approach may help children to associate meaning to images and text at a much earlier age than we may have previously thought, and help to develop those synaptic connections faster, than just using images and sounds alone. There is considerable evidence that language is innate, and that visual literacy is as well. Could it be that reading, or the recognition of symbols, is also innate in humans?

The other questions are whether the children taught to read with this program are actually comprehending what they are reading, as in the case of the little boy reading about parallelograms and trapezoids? Do they advance faster than others in 1st and 2nd grade, when other children traditionally learn to read? Will teachers recognize these "advanced" readers and give them reading material that will enhance further brain development (e.g. reading to learn, narratives), or will they be held back by curriculum designed for very early readers? And, do they hit the "fourth-grade slump" earlier than other children, if at all? Much more research is needed, that is obvious, and not from Dr. Titzer himself.