Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
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.
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.
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.
My parents always spoke to me as an adult. I'll leave it to you to judge how well it turned out.
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.
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.
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?
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. :)
I cringe when I see parents get upset when they have to explain something slightly embarrassing to their children.
Of course I also now look back at the downright stupid things I did as a kid and realize I was not nearly as smart as I thought...
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.
The lesson I take from this is that it's not that people can't read legalese, but that from a young age they quite reasonably would rather do something interesting instead.
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.....
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.
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.
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."
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.
You're not interested in teaching them to justify poor judgement, you're trying to teach them the judgement skills directly.
Of course, situations vary.
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.
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)