#4 - For newborns of age four to six weeks whose mothers

[martinbeslu]

Knowing when to generalize and when not to was the difficult part of this question for me. For the correct answer choice C we have to generalize by assuming that the example given of newborns of age four to six weeks applies to “babies” in general. I did NOT pick answer C because of this generalization and that lead me to the wrong answer. I also didn’t think the “release from discomfort” part was supported AT ALL by the stimulus. It seems that just because the baby stops crying doesn’t mean that they are released from discomfort. It just means that the newborn thinks it’s request for food (crying) has been heard and that they will now be fed so they don’t need to keep crying for the moment. Nowhere in the stimulus does it say or even imply that because the baby stops crying momentarily it has been relieved of discomfort. I guess we need to generalize and make an assumption for this phrase as well that if a baby stops crying momentarily that indicates that they have been relieved of discomfort.

I chose answer E because given only the information in the stimulus, “discomfort in newborns is best relieved by hearing the mother’s voice” is the only statement that is supported by the stimulus without applying the specific newborn example to babies in general. If babies stop crying when they hear their mother’s voice but not when they here ANY OTHER voice (and we are assuming that not crying indicates relief from discomfort according to correct answer C) so a mother’s voice MUST be the best way. I guess we just have to get used to learning how the test writers think and knowing what is ok to generalize and what is not. Even after reading over this one several times I still don’t “agree” that answer choice C is the most strongly supported statement but I know that I need to accept that it is the correct answer and to justify that in my mind.

[Daniel Stern]

Hi Martin:

Although I think you are correct that LSAC is expecting a generalization here from "newborns" of a particular age in the stimulus to "babies" in the credited response C, I still believe there are adequate reasons that C is the best response over E.

The stimulus limits the comforting effect of the mother's voice to babies "whose mothers have been the primary caregiver."

C correctly states that it is the primary caregiver's voice that has the ameliorative effect; presumably, if the primary caregiver were someone other than mom, it would be that person's voice, rather than mom's, that does the trick.

In your analysis, you say that LSAC is assuming that because the baby has stopped crying, the baby's discomfort has been relieved. But C doesn't actually say that the baby's discomfort has been relieved: C merely states that the baby associates the voice with the release from discomfort, and thus stops crying. The baby may still be uncomfortable, but hearing the voice lets baby know the end of the discomfort is near.

By contrast, it is answer E that goes too far and suggests that it is the voice itself that relieves the discomfort. This is not supported by the stimulus.

Further, the word "best" in E makes the answer choice wrong. In your analysis, you suggest that because mom's voice works better than other voices, you believed that supported mom's voicing being the best method, as stated in E. However, E is not merely comparing mom's voice to other voices: E is comparing mom's voice to all methods of relieving the discomfort. Maybe mom's voice stops the hungry baby's cries, but is it going to be better than actually feeding the hungry baby? We can't say based on the stimulus.

Be extremely wary of superlative terms such as "best" in must be true answer choices. Don't necessarily eliminate them out of hand, but make sure the stimulus gives you that extreme level of support.

I hope that is helpful. Good luck in your studies!

Dan

[martinbeslu]

Thank you Dan. That is a great explanation! You guys are really good at this.

Can you help me a little more with understanding why answer choice D is not correct. I understand that it is wrong because of the word "only", but it seems like the word "often" just before it makes this not such an absolute statement. Wouldn't it be strongly supported (but not necessarily proven) that often only the mother can provide comfort to a newborn. The reason I say this is because there is such strong wording in the stimulus. "Merely hearing the mother's voice will lead to a temporary halt in crying, while the voices of others DO NOT have this effect." This is such an absolute statement. Nobody else's voice, not even the father's, will lead to a temporary halt in crying (unless he is the primary caregiver)? This seems to strongly support that often (but not always) it is only the primary caregiver that can provide the comfort that the baby is looking for.

The reason I am having such a hard time with answer choice C is that it doesn’t say anything in the stimulus that supports the statement that babies associate the mother’s voice with release from discomfort. In many LSAT questions we are supposed to avoid answer traps that make assumptions like this. Maybe babies just find the mother’s voice pleasant, or familiar, or interesting and this causes the baby to stop crying temporarily. Why would we assume that the baby stops crying because it thinks that it will be relieved from discomfort when it hears it’s mother’s voice rather than a million other potential reasons? A similar example would be a mother singing a baby to sleep. OFTEN only a mother can get the baby to sleep but SOMETIMES a grandmother can get the baby to sleep.

[Malila Robinson]

Hi Martin,
For (D) it would need to reflect that this is true when it is the baby's mother who is the primary caregiver for the infant. The same may not be true for a primary caregiver who is not the baby's mother.

For (C) the stimulus says that if babies are crying due to discomfort, such as hunger, hearing mom's voice will temporarily halt the crying. This shows that the mom's voice has an effect on the baby's perception of discomfort.

Malila

[bonnie_a]

Hello, I have a question on answer choice D. I assume the main problem with this answer choice is the word, only but I was really tempted to go with D because I saw the word, often. I thought this limited scenario or case in the stimulus supports that often only the primary caregivers can provide comfort to a newborn. No matter whether that be a father or mother, it is true in this specific instance that we are given in the stimulus. Thank you!

[evelineliu]

Hi Bonnie,

For (D), we cannot infer that the mother "provides comfort" under the circumstances described since all that happens is that the child stops crying for the moment. The discomfort could still continue.

Hope that helps!
Eveline

[lsatquestions]

Hi Martin,
For (D) it would need to reflect that this is true when it is the baby's mother who is the primary caregiver for the infant. The same may not be true for a primary caregiver who is not the baby's mother.

For (C) the stimulus says that if babies are crying due to discomfort, such as hunger, hearing mom's voice will temporarily halt the crying. This shows that the mom's voice has an effect on the baby's perception of discomfort.

Malila

I did end up choosing C for this question because of the word 'only' in D, but I'm a bit confused by your explanation. In response to your explanation here, C also says primary caregiver instead of mother. So by the same logic that the same may not be true for a primary caregiver who is not the baby's mother, that would make C wrong.

[Beth Hayden]

Hi LSAT,

You are right that both (C) and (D) are extrapolating from mother primary caregivers to all primary caregivers. However, keep in mind that this is a "most reasonably supported" question, and so the stimulus doesn't have to prove the answer choice entirely, it just has to provide support for it (and more so than the other answer choices). This is definitely an assumption we have to make but that's not fatal for (C) because we have a little bit of wiggle room to make (reasonable) assumptions. I would like (C) better if it specified only mother primary caregivers, but we have to find the best answer choice based on what they've given us.

We can eliminate (A) and (B) right away because there is no evidence to support them at all. We have no idea how newborns react to other people's voices and nothing in the stimulus even implies that a mother's voice is the first thing the baby learns to recognize. We can also eliminate (E) because we have no idea how mom's voice stacks up to other ways of providing comfort.

That leaves us with (C) and (D). Both of them require us to make the assumption that the information in the stimulus also applies to other types of primary caregivers, but that's not an unreasonable thing to extrapolate. So we are going to have to find some other reason to eliminate (C) or (D). There are a few problems with (D), and (D) is a much stronger statement than (C). First of all, we don't know that the mother's voice is actually comforting them, just that they stop crying. Also, we don't know that the primary caregiver is the only one that can provide comfort--maybe their voice doesn't have this effect, but they can comfort newborns by picking them up and holding them.

To simplify things, I'm going to explain this by just focusing on hunger specifically. A baby is hungry so it cries because it knows that by crying its caregiver will come and bring it food. Then the baby hears its mother's voice and knows that food is coming soon, so it stops crying but is still hungry. Answer choice (C) gets at this distinction by stating that the babies just associate that voice with relief from discomfort--they know they will feel better soon, even though hearing mom's voice in and of itself doesn't actually make them less hungry.

I hope that helps! I know these questions can be a bit annoying when no answer choice is "perfect" in the way we would expect in a must be true question. The key is to differentiate between big flaws and minor imperfections, and look for ways to firmly eliminate wrong answers.

Beth

[PresidentLSAT]

Hello powerscore,

I found A difficult to rule out. That they easily recognize their mothers' voices isn't a crazy inference to make. Let's take two groups of babies, groups X & Z. Primary caregivers are the mothers of X. Primary caregivers are the nannies of Z. According to this stimulus, only X stopped crying when they heard the voices of their primary caregivers-their mother. Z kept crying despite hearing their nannies' voices. The "other people" here can represent Z, which supports answer A.

I used the same logic for C, it's why I ruled it out. What if the primary caregiver is not the mother? I think we can ask this question because the stimulus did not say all babies, between 4-6. There is a qualifying distinction of a specific group of babies; ages 4-6 who have their mothers as primary caregivers. This requires an unsupported assumption that the primary caregiver is the mother by default. Hard sell when a distinction was made in the beginning. Could you please let me know what I am missing here? Thank you.

[Paul Popa]

Hi President,

Hope you're doing well as the leader of the LSAT world!

It's very important to remember to be careful with scope on Most Strongly Supported questions. The facts in the stimulus suggest something very narrow: that infants have formed a bond with their mothers, and the sound of their mother's voice is an indication that help is on the way.

(A) is a pretty strong claim. What supports the idea that babies more easily learn to recognize the voices of their mothers as opposed to other people? It could very well be, as the stimulus suggests, that the primary caregiver, whoever that person is, might be the person whose voice the baby has the easiest time learning. I see what you're saying in your write-up about nannies, but I don't think the stimulus is saying that because the primary caregiver is the mother that babies recognize them, but that because the mother is the primary caregiver. So, based on this stimulus, I don't think your group Z would necessarily fail to stop crying.

There are a few tempting answer choices in the batch, but (C) does a great job of making a claim based on what we're given in the stimulus. Because babies temporarily stopped crying when they heard their primary caregivers' voices, it does lend support to the idea that they have associated that voice with caretaking from before, and that help is now on the way. I see what you're saying about a select group of babies (newborns 4-6 weeks old) being mentioned in the stimulus, and while perhaps (C) could have said "Some babies" at the beginning, it's still the best answer out of the five given.

Overall, I don't think the argument is making a claim that mothers are more special to babies because they're mothers--it's because they are the primary caregiver that they have this unique effect on the babies in the stimulus. Hope this helps!