
Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency - fogus
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512172529.htm
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lmkg
Kids learn not just the language, but the _dialect(s)_ that they're exposed
to. At that age, being talked to is the only way they have of acquiring
language, so they're going acquire exactly what they're exposed to. The idea
of dialects is absolutely critical, but a lot of people aren't aware of
them[1]. A kid isn't going to learn proper English unless they're raised
hearing and talking it, no amount of grammar instruction is going to make
proper English anything more than another foreign language unless they're
actually speaking it for themselves.

This is not to say that "proper" English is any better than dialects of
English. I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. That said, a) "proper"
English is a pretty significant signalling mechanism so it's socially
advantageous to speak it fluently b) if language influences thought patterns,
"baby talk" is a pretty crippled language and you shouldn't cripple your kid's
expressive or reasoning abilities. Even if they grow out of it, replacing
their language facilities is lost development time.

[1] Going sociopolitical for a second: This is more of a problem for people
who are members of the group "in power," for various definitions of the term,
but being a middle-class white guy in America qualifies. If you're "in power"
and your own dialect is the default, then you don't have to switch dialects
depending on the social situation, which makes you less sensitive to the
presence of dialects as well as their role in social interactions.

~~~
foldr
> if language influences thought patterns, "baby talk" is a pretty crippled
> language and you shouldn't cripple your kid's expressive or reasoning
> abilities.

Kids are actually pretty insensitive to the precise form of linguistic input
they get. It doesn't matter much if it's baby talk directed at the kid, or the
ambient speech of other adults. Any regular exposure to a language/dialect is
sufficient for a kid to acquire it perfectly. (Bearing in mind that perfect
acquisition of a non-standard dialect may be viewed by the linguistically
ignorant as imperfect acquisition of the standard dialect.) There's certainly
no evidence for "baby talk" crippling kids reasoning abilities.

There are even cultures where parents don't talk to their kids until the kids
can talk back, but the kids don't grow up with any kind of linguistic deficit.

Of course, there may be sociological benefits to having your kid acquire
something close to standard English as their native dialect. But if schools
could get over prescriptivism and do a better job of teaching standard
English, I doubt this would be so much of an issue.

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gjm11
Aside from the generall "well, duh" factor (see e.g. Groxx's comment), the
usual complaint applies here: there are some really hard-to-control-for
factors. For instance, I bet "talking seriously with children" is very
strongly correlated with parents' intelligence, which in turn is strongly
correlated with children's intelligence, which in turn is strongly correlated
with language proficiency. (For any reasonable definition of "intelligence",
slippery though that term is.)

The relevant publication here seems to be the one available in pieces at
<http://dare.uva.nl/record/334829> and, indeed, it doesn't look as if the
researcher has tried to control for parents' intelligence, education, etc. For
that matter, the sample size is only 25 so it would be difficult to do so and
still get any results worth reporting.

I'm underwhelmed by this.

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jhancock
I have noticed this about people I know that have good vocabularies and were
top students when they were young: Their fathers don't do baby talk. When I've
seen their fathers interacting with young children, they talk to them as young
adults. Is this a known correlation or is my sample size too small?

~~~
GavinB
When I was a kid one of my teachers asked me if I'd gotten a boo-boo. "No," I
told her, "It's an injury."

My parents always spoke to me as an adult. I'll leave it to you to judge how
well it turned out.

~~~
pavlov
My native language is Finnish. There are plenty of dialects in Finland, and
the official written form of the language is kind of an artificial synthesis
of various dialect traits -- nobody really speaks written Finnish.

That is, except me when I was six... My parents would go to a school meeting
and the teachers and other parents would be surprised -- "Oh, you don't speak
in written language like your son?".

I guess I had been spending quite a bit more time with books rather than
people.

~~~
philwelch
My problem with learning English (my native language) from books rather than
people was knowing tons of words but not how to pronounce them.

~~~
sketerpot
Occasionally I'll use an unusual word without even thinking about it, and then
later realize that I've never uttered that word aloud before. Ever. It's a
pretty weird feeling.

~~~
nwinter
We play a game where you think of words you've never said before and try use
them in a sentence. (So if you don't know roughly what it means, it doesn't
count.) It's fun because you try unsuccessfully to search for words with the
weakest indices before eventually finding profitable seams by thinking of the
crazy stuff you've read.

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impeachgod
Hey, I do remember as a kid being frustrated when people would dumb down when
talking to you. Also, when they refused to talk to me about things because "I
was too young to be concerned about these things." Pissed me right off. I
always liked the adults who took me seriously.

~~~
leftnode
Exactly. My son was just born, and I fully plan on talking to him like an
adult when possible, and not shying away from things like sex and politics
just because he's young. That doesn't mean I'd describe graphic sexual acts to
him, but talking frankly with honest language I think will be best.

I cringe when I see parents get upset when they have to explain something
slightly embarrassing to their children.

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Groxx
I feel like this deserves a "well, duh". If you speak gobbledygook or fluff
around them, that's all they'll learn. How can you expect otherwise?

This does propose an interesting experiment: any of you lawyers out there,
read laws to the kids as bed-time stories! Maybe we'll finally have someone
who can translate between Legalese and English. Maybe they'll come up with a
pidgin / creole the rest of us can learn.

~~~
run4yourlives
There's no real secret to legalese. It's just an attempt to say as little as
possible in as many ways as possible in order to avoid any interpretation
being applied.

The problem isn't the language, it's that the human brain doesn't function
that way.

~~~
Groxx
_"The problem isn't the language, it's that the human brain doesn't function
that way."_

Yes, but this sort of implies that we have a genetic predisposition to _not_
understand Legalese. Attempting to get a kid to learn it as a "native"
language would effectively show that it _is_ possible to learn, it just may be
a radical departure from all other forms of language. If it's not possible, it
could be that we're genetically prevented from learning it... I wonder if that
would be an argument that Evolution has decided Legalese is counter to our
best interest as a species.

Maybe someone fully understanding Legalese could help us communicate with
aliens. While I doubt _they_ would speak Legalese, and may attempt to destroy
us if they heard it directed towards them as a first-contact language, having
a second fundamentally different language model may shed light on
understanding other, more radically different ones.

Unless of course Legalese is on one extrema and the rest of Human languages is
on another. Which would imply aliens speak some form of language we can
understand...

Hmmmm.....

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foldr
The only reference I could find for this was the following conference
presentation:

[http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/l.henrichs/bestanden/LHenrichs...](http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/l.henrichs/bestanden/LHenrichs_Paper_EARLI2007.pdf)

It seems to be based on some rather odd (and completely unsupported) ideas of
what constitutes an "academic register", and the results are pretty messy. It
would be better if Science Daily could give a real citation to back this up.

 _edit_ : There is also this, listed on the author's homepage:

Henrichs, L. F., & Schoonen, R. (2009). Lexical features of parental academic
language input. The effect on vocabulary growthin monolingual Dutch children.
In B. J. Richards, H. M. Daller, D. D. Malvern, P. P. Meara, J. Milton & J.
Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Vocabulary studies in first and second language
acquisition: the interface between theory and application (pp. 1-22).
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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johnswamps
I've always thought that if I had children I would try to treat them less like
little kids and with more autonomy. For example if they misbehaved, instead of
just punishing them, I would give them a chance to write a paraphraph or two
if they wished to dispute the punishment. Or giving them some (though not
complete) freedom in choosing what to do, such as "would you prefer to go the
opera, play, or concert?" Is this a good idea or am I being too optimistic?

~~~
pchristensen
Maybe too optimistic but the right idea. The tricks I've found with giving my
4 year old autonomy and responsibility are

a) make it abundantly clear that sometimes, what Daddy says, goes, and

b) realizing that kids behavior fluctuates up and down with their energy level
and environment. Trying to rationalize with a kid who didn't eat lunch, or
who's wasted at the end of the day is a lost cause and you just have to step
up and enforce.

~~~
pixelbath
Agreed. I've tried trading one punishment for another, and the only thing it
seems to teach is that punishment is malleable, and that they can start
"gaming" the punishments for less harsh ones, even if the situation calls.

I promised myself when I was a child that I would never tell my children,
"because I said so." You know, sometimes it really is "you just have to put up
with it and do what I say...because I'm Daddy, and I said so."

~~~
run4yourlives
Because I said so works, but you aren't actually thinking this in your own
head, so why not just take the time once everyone is back in listening mode to
give them the long version?

Dad: Go to bed, please.

Kid: Why?

Dad: Because I said so.

post hysterics...

Dad: Why do you think Dad was telling you to go to sleep?

Kid: I don't know.

Dad: Well, what are you doing today?

Kid: Going to school.

Dad: And if you don't sleep before you go to school, what happens... etc etc.

Of course this is variable on the child, the issue and the level of
understanding. I've done this though and while it doesn't solve the immediate
concern, it sure as hell helps with any possible recurrence.

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brc
We use this approach with our two-year-old. He has never had baby talk, we use
the proper words for everything, and he gets multiple reading sessions per day
- which he enjoys.

Health professoinals have told us that he speaks with the proficiency of a 3-4
year old, and he is noticeably more advanced than his peers. To me this is
plain common sense and doesn't need a scientific paper.

~~~
kurtosis
are you serious about this common sense business? There are a lot of plausible
reasons why "baby talk" could actually be essential for linguistic or
emotional development. While it does seem dumbed down to an adult, in some
ways it simplifies language and conversational protocols. How would you know
who is right without a scientific study?

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nhooey
There is, however, a purpose to using baby-talk with infants. It just
shouldn't be used with children as they get older and have already developed
their language skills to a certain degree.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk#Use_with_infants>

~~~
Groxx
_Infants actually pay more attention when parents use infant-directed
language, which is a slower, repetitive tone used in a regular conversations._

How many "baby-talkers" do you know speak slower or more repetitively? Most
babble quickly and in a high pitch.

At least, that's been my experience with what people consider to be "baby
talk". Speaking slower and more simply / repetitively with infants seems to be
essentially the same as speaking "seriously" with them, as you don't use
complex words or phrasing with adults starting to learn your language, and you
deal with _them_ seriously too. (or, you should be)

~~~
alsomike
Infants are at a completely different stage of language acquisition than 3-6
year olds, so there's no reason to think that there's a single best
"essentially the same" way of speaking regardless of age.

~~~
Groxx
I meant equivalence, not equality.

------
kingkilr
I don't know if it's the same effect, but I've found that I write as if I were
giving a speech or a talk. I suspect this is because, growing up almost all of
the arguments I presented were oral ones, in school we didn't really write
persuasive essays until upper-middle school, however, I'd been arguing
politics, science, history and whatever else over dinner with my family.

------
joubert
to kill a mockingbird

