Cognition and Language Lab has a video from ABC news about "new research" that says you should say something like 20,000 words to your baby every day if you want them to be intelligent and do well in school.

I have no problem believing that the amount of speech an infant hears correlates with overall cognitive development, but I'd take everything this video says with a grain of salt. They spend a good portion of time shilling for a product called the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) System, which you can buy for $400. You stick it in your kid's pocket, and it records and tracks audio input for up to 16 hours. Supposedly it keeps track of how many words your child has heard all day. But the news piece says you can't just plop your kid down in front of a TV, that the device can discriminate "natural" speech. I smell bullshit.

How in the hell could they possibly discriminate between speech from a TV set or radio, and why wouldn't you necessarily want to count that as word exposure anyway?

I'm wondering if Diane Sawyer owns stock in LENA...