
Chattering to babies may be even better than reading to them - pepys
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/01/importance-of-chattering-away-to-babies.html
======
JabavuAdams
It makes intuitive sense, however much that's worth. It's likely that parents
(and others) will spend much more time talking to an infant than reading to
it. Also, conversations will naturally occur in context with the surrounding
actions. Reading's a somewhat artificial activity that demands concentration
-- i.e. excluding other sense information. Whereas conversation about daily
life can engage all the senses.

So, more data + more correlations with daily life and other senses = better
learning?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _Reading 's a somewhat artificial activity that demands concentration --
> i.e. excluding other sense information. Whereas conversation about daily
> life can engage all the senses._ //

This I find strange. Reading demands concentration, sure, but we're talking
about being read to as the comparison for conversation. So instead of having a
story read to you, and the ensuing imagination of any aspect of anything you
can imagine - the smell of a dragon's lair, the feeling of riding on a giant
frog, the taste of snozcumbers, ... - you're stuck with concentrating on
someone talking and being limited to the domain of real world interactions.

Imagination is no more artificial than conversation - both seem able to engage
all the senses but immersion in a fantastical tale seems more likely to do so
to me than talking to some one (unless the conversation is specifically
tailored to multi-sensory awareness, which is certainly a facet of some
conversation I have in my parenting).

~~~
maxerickson
The article is about babies. They aren't really at the point where they are
even able to imagine abstract ideas, they are mostly associating words with
objects.

~~~
Retra
I know I'm being nit-picky, but words are associated with experiences, not
objects. (E.g., "red" is not an object. "circle" is not an object.)

This is especially important when you consider the fact that most people treat
their language to be operating on some intricate notion of _reference_, when
in fact it is based upon correlations of states of experience that may be very
noisy. This kind of misunderstanding often leads people into a position where
they do not know why things are true or why their words have meaning.

~~~
ajcarpy2005
You're partially correct. Words we learn are linked to experience of their
usage but they're also linked to other words and to tangible things in our
experiences such as things like books or teachers or places which are objects.
Objects have use-cases ie. Expected purposes and these are linked to the type
of experiences you've personally had, imagined, or which seem to you likely or
possible to have with a given object. When you go to a restaurant you have
expectations in mind based on the restaurant object being linked to other
restaurants.

~~~
Retra
>Words we learn are linked to experience of their usage but they're also
linked to other words and to tangible things in our experiences such as things
like books or teachers or places which are objects.

You and I are on the same page, but you're using the word 'experience' in a
more narrow sense than I am. You can experience words and things that are
(roughly) objects and my point still stands. Things that are objects are still
better thought of generally as experiences. It's just more consistent.

Another way of putting this is that language learning is mostly about encoding
the appropriateness of linguistic constructs in varying contexts. So it is
appropriate to act like you are in a restaurant when you are in what looks to
be a restaurant. It is appropriate to run with the pack. It is appropriate to
run from a lion and chase down a gazelle. This is basically the whole point of
a nervous system, if you want to go wild with it. We just evolved a
specialized adaptation for using our 'appropriateness-engines' on words and
symbols rather than general feelings of what is going on around us.

At least, that's a rough draft of what I'm getting at.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

All very important to know, but at this point this is kind of a useless
article because it's highlighting only one random result out of hundreds of
studies that have looked at these issues.

~~~
ashark
You second point sent me googling. I found, among other things, this:

[http://www.readingonline.org/articles/burgess/](http://www.readingonline.org/articles/burgess/)

Is it really as settled as you present it? From my brief survey it appears
that reading to/with preschool-aged kids has _some_ measurable effect on
reading development, and that it has a more substantial effect on oral
language skills. Is that inaccurate?

It seems incredible to me that narrating events would be of great value but
reading, examining, and asking questions about a picture book (these are the
things you do when reading a picture book to kids, you don't just read the
text aloud) would be of very little or no value.

~~~
Alex3917
> Is it really as settled as you present it?

One of the most interesting findings from Scarborough & Dobrich, which looks
like it was replicated by the study you linked to, is that the number of books
in a child's home is a _much_ greater predictor of later literacy ability than
the amount parents actually read to their kids. A couple things to note
though:

\- Intrinsic motivation plays a big role in this. E.g. if a kid enjoys have
books read to them, it will probably be beneficial. But if a kid would rather
be doing something else, then reading to them may be actively harmful, in that
it may actually make them read less on their own later even though otherwise
they would have eventually come to enjoy reading.

\- The way you read to your kid matters. E.g. asking questions about the book
as you're reading is more beneficial than just reading, and even the way you
phrase the questions makes a difference. That Hart & Risley book I linked to
above has some data about how the cognitive benefits of asking questions
depends on their grammatical structure.

Also, for what it's worth this may be related to the audio/video gap. I.e.
talking to kids has a huge benefit for them, but playing recordings or videos
of people talking has essentially no benefit.

~~~
jacalata
>playing recordings or videos of people talking has essentially no benefit.

Really? I thought it had some, but possibly only if access to real
conversation was limited. Any good reading on this?

~~~
Alex3917
Just google for "video deficit."

------
TheBiv
This article seems to be highly linked to a study summarized by this NYT
article [1] where Hart and Risley were studying how parents of different
socioeconomic backgrounds talked to their babies. Every month, the researchers
visited the 42 families in the study and recorded an hour of parent-child
interaction.

The study found that amount of variety in exposed words from real people
mattered much more than just the amount of words a child was exposed to, when
it relates to their development.

[1][http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/04/10/the-p...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/04/10/the-
power-of-talking-to-your-baby/)

------
azinman2
So while I haven't read the PDF (I don't have an account/institution), I
wonder how robust this study is given that it's based on a questionnaire on
how often people talk to their babies. This kind of self-reporting is often
troubled as the assumptions as to what 'always' means is very relative on a
per person basis. It wouldn't surprise me that people who read frequently to
their baby might under report how much they speak to their baby when given a
line of questioning about it, and vice versa.

I also question how much you can really test a baby for cognitive development
that is robust against time to say anything about adulthood. The Ages and
Stages questionnaire used is about assessing delayed development versus
adulthood, and the sensitivity is as low as 51% for the 4-month ASQ and 75%
overall, and the specificity is 86% [1]. These numbers themselves aren't super
great which only will compound with the cohort study in question.

It's probably better to do both, especially as when the child ages reading to
them helps them gain practice reading themselves. I fear that many people will
look at a headline like this and feel like they can avoid reading to their
kids by turning on the radio.

[1]
[http://www.psychwiki.com/dms/other/labgroup/Measufsdfsdbger3...](http://www.psychwiki.com/dms/other/labgroup/Measufsdfsdbger345resWeek1/Lindsay/Squires1998.pdf)

~~~
Gimpei
Agreed. Reporting behavior could be correlated with unobservables that are
driving the results. Interesting study but far from conclusive. IMHO
correlations like this are useful for driving future, more rigorous research,
not for drawing broad conclusions.

------
ashark
Their link to the paper contains a typo, at least as I see it.

Fixed:

[https://www.esri.ie/publications/latest_publications/view/in...](https://www.esri.ie/publications/latest_publications/view/index.xml?id=3909)

------
junto
My son is about 18 months old and we are bringing him up bilingually. He is
currently very echolalic. It is fascinating.

He copies things he hears, normally one or two of the words from sentences
people say around him. You can also give him new words and he repeats them
almost exactly.

I spend lots of the limited time I get with him pointing at things and telling
him what they are. He loves these word games too. We also look at lots of
picture books, but he seems to take in more when we just "talk".

I really love this period of the children growing up. They haven't quite
reached that 'terrible twos' stage yet.

------
afterburner
Grossly speculating, but it probably has the long-term benefit of getting the
parent in the habit of talking to the kid about various things later on.

------
jmnicolas
It's a bit foggy but I think a German emperor (might have been Wilhelm II)
wanting to know the language of angels took several babies and instructed
their caretakers to take good care of them but not to talk to them, at all.

His reasoning was that the babies would start to speak the original language
of humans.

All the babies died.

Whatever you do, read, talk, sing or even rant but communicate with your baby.

~~~
danudey
Having a newborn myself (three weeks tomorrow!), I can't imagine not talking
to him at every possible opportunity. Carrying him around, putting him down,
picking him up, burping him, changing him, we fill it all with words because
that's just what makes sense. I really can't picture someone not doing that.

------
mrbonner
That's great! It's about time I am so fucking tired of the Big Red Dog: the
same stupid dog featured in hundreds of books.

------
lexcorvus
Compared to other parents, highly verbal parents both talk more to their
children and pass on genes for higher verbal ability, so it's impossible to
reach a firm conclusion on the value of "chattering" (or reading, etc.) from
such studies unless they control for genes. Judging from the abstract, this
study did not.

~~~
UrMomReadsHN
I am not sure where you made a link between having idle one sided chatter with
a baby = having genes for high verbal ability.

Anyways, there's a lot of research that does consider nature vs nurture...
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/children_s_language_development_talk_and_listen_to_them_from_birth.html)

~~~
lexcorvus
The key issue is that there _could be_ a link. Because of this possibility,
you need to control for genes to reach any strong conclusions. For example,
you could check to see if the verbal ability of adoptive children more closely
resembles the ability of their (adopted) siblings or of their biological
parents. Or you could compare twins reared apart to see if their abilities
more closely track each other's or those of their adoptive parents.

The Slate article you linked doesn't deal with nature vs. nurture at all. It
simply assumes that nature doesn't matter, approvingly citing the views of one
researcher who makes the astonishing claim that "Children aren’t born smart.
They’re made smart by their parents talking to them." This view is
definitively disproven both by studies of adoptive children and by studies of
twins reared apart (not to mention common sense—cognitive ability must be at
least partly heritable, else there would be no way for ever smarter animals to
have evolved). For more details, I recommend _The Blank Slate_ by Stephen
Pinker.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

Very important to know, but not news.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

This really isn't news.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

This really isn't news.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

This really isn't news.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

This really isn't news.

------
Alex3917
\- We've known about the value of talking to babies since Hart & Risley
published their study in 1995: [http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-
Everyday-Experi...](http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Differences-Everyday-
Experience-American/dp/1557661979)

\- We've known that there is basically no value in reading to your kids since
Scarborough & Dobrich published their report in 1994.

------
facepalm
It would never have occurred to me to read to my baby, to be honest. Do other
parents do that?

~~~
thorin
Everyone I know (in the UK) does this from an early age. Not sure why -
tradition? Like Johnny 5 in short circuit babies "need input!". Our one year
old has enjoyed listening to music, watching tv (not kids TV and not too much)
played with tablets, remote controls, and played with my instruments and
guitar amps. Ever since she's been able to crawl she's been grabbing books
from her little shelf and bringing them over for me to read for her.

~~~
facepalm
Her bringing books sounds great.

------
afterburner
Grossly speculating, but it probably has the long-term benefit of getting the
parent in the habit of talking to the kid about various things later on.

------
afterburner
Grossly speculating, but it probably has the long-term benefit of getting the
parent in the habit of talking to the kid about various things later on.

------
afterburner
Grossly speculating, but it probably has the long-term benefit of getting the
parent in the habit of talking to the kid about various things later on.

