Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

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

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/l.henrichs/bestanden/LHenrichs...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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