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Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

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Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#11

Post by pavlov »

GavinB wrote: post #4
jhancock wrote: post #3

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?

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.

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.

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#12

Post by 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.

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#13

Post by pixelbath »

jhancock wrote: post #3

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?

What's your sample size? Are you a teacher, or just referring to friends and acquaintances of yours?

I've received numerous compliments on how well my children speak. All I ever did was speak to them like people (in the way that I would like to be spoken to), and explain any concepts or words they didn't understand using concepts and words they already did understand.

It just seemed...obvious. If you're going to treat your children like they're idiots, why would you expect them to turn out any different?

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#14

Post by MikeCapone »

pavlov wrote: post #11
GavinB wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I've sometimes had the same problem. my native language is French, and I mostly learned English by myself with books, computers, and music. Sometimes when I spoke, it sounded more like something a character in a book would say than what a typical person would.

Exposure to more flesh-and-blook Anglophones has mostly fixed that, though.

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#15

Post by pixelbath »

pchristensen wrote: post #9
johnswamps wrote: post #6

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…

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 st…

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."

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#18

Post by 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.

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#19

Post by 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.

Re: Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency

#20

Post by nfnaaron »

pixelbath wrote: post #13
jhancock wrote: post #3

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?

What's your sample size? Are you a teacher, or just referring to friends and acquaintances of yours? I've received numerous compliments on how well my children speak. All I ever did was speak to them like people (in the way that I would like to be spoken to), and explain any concepts or words they didn't understand using concepts and words they already did understand. It just seemed...obvious. If you're going to trea…

I never made a conscious decision, but I mostly talked to my kid like he was a normal human being with all rights and privileges. Not to say I never went loony on him, but "normal" situations got normal conversation, with perhaps a bit more enthusiasm/encouragement thrown in.

And now at twelve he gets compliments on his articulation and engagement, and he treats me as a normal human being with all rights and privileges. Although I expect that treatment to stop any day now, as he approaches his teens. Nice while it lasted though. :)

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