Kids with chattier parents are more talkative, may have bigger vocabulary | Hacker News Reader

Kids with chattier parents are more talkative, may have bigger vocabulary

science.org

73 pointskherndon58 comments

Personal anecdote, since day one me and my wife have been speaking to our baby girl like she is our best friend. For example in the mornings I’d never let my daughter just mong out in front of the TV while making breakfast. I bought a montessori step so she can climb up and stand next to me as I wash vegetables, cut bread, fry eggs, brew coffee, etc. and I talk to her non stop. I name everything I touch, I involve her by making her hold items, press buttons etc and her speech development is phenomenal for her age. She is 17 months now and speaks German to me, English to my wife and Gujarati to her grandmother. She can’t speak normally yet but she picked up in all three languages enough vocabulary already to say exactly what she wants or if something is not right. She counts beyond 10 in two languages and knows to say words in German to me and in English to my wife. We can point at an item in succession and she’d say it in the correct language depending on who pointed to it. It’s amazing, I see other kids at her age and they literally can barely say 5 words.

First kid I presume? You'll be amazed at the learning rate of the second and third.

Yes, first one :)

What can I expect from the second? It’s on its way :D

I noticed that taller parents have taller kids, which is similar. I wonder if there's some kind of mechanism underneath both correlations.

I'd never thought of "tall" as a behavior.

There’s a behavioural component.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/08/scientists-try...

I like that this article has a wrong conversion in the first sentence.

If you're referring to the 1.71m = 5.6 feet. It's technically correct but confusing, 5.6' != 5'6".

5.6feet =5'7"

That's the point of the comment. That behavior is as likely to be shaped by genetics as any other trait. There's not as much unique stuff about behavior as people usually think.

Myself and my ex wife are quite tall. All my kids are short. YMMV.

What about the mail man?

IME one only has to worry about the taller and more handsome ones. (Being a shorter person that's usually all of them in my case.)

You might want to get a DNA test.

Ah, that’s a common problem with children. You need to wait a few years. They’ll grow out of it.

Behavior patterns are patterns you learn because you just see it every day.

You can already see this in a lot of kids and recognize their parents through it.

Behavior can be genetic. Sometimes at wedding you can see which part is the brides (or grooms) family bacause they all have the same worried look and wrinkles shaped by it.

I don't think so.

There are probably plenty of examples of kids in foster care who do not share those behavior patterns

You don’t think behavior can be genetic?

> I noticed that taller parents have taller kids,

Probably because of genes and access to nutritious food.

as a tall parent, I am able to pick up my offspring by the arms, and let them 'grow down' until they reach their full length

It's also important to install shower heads at a tall height. Children prefer to be watered from above.

This finding is even less surprising, since it could come about by either nature or nurture — whereas height is mostly determined by nature, in the absence of malnutrition.

Incredible scientific breakthrough here. Kids may speak sooner and have a better vocabulary if their parents talk more. Almost as if they learn from us. Amazing!

Could be genetic too, at least in part

It is isn't true until it's science.

Big brain opinion

If you read the study they were trying to see if class had anything to do with it.

I think comments here don't focus on the most important point of this study, and article:

- citation: But the findings don’t necessarily mean kids speak more because they hear more speech, he says: Instead, “Adults [might] talk back more to kids who produce more language.”

- article show no evidence of socio-economic difference contrary to what was claimed before

- article have a huge database over the world, which makes it a strong study.

- article is a baby step: the next step are to know if it's talking to the child or if it's talking beside the child, for example.

Not a native English speaker. can you explain what do mean by "if it's talking beside the child" ?

Not the parent but I take it to mean speaking directly to the child versus the child being in the same room as people who are talking.

Thanks:)

Idk I have a mother who legit never stops talking and I'm the complete opposite. My brother and I play a game when we're all together where we see if we can count to 30 without her talking. Never once hit 30, closest was like 22.

The study was with kids, so maybe that changes as they get older?

It's an interesting question. Maybe a parent that monopolize the conversation impact negatively.

As for your experience, keep in mind that with statistics comes distribution of outcomes, you could be on that small % where things didn't work as observed in the article.

my mom is like this too and i have a really strong negative reaction towards anyone who dominates a conversation or talks too much as a result

I have a relative like that. Now that my wife barely cares about what I have to say, I’ve realised how My mom is different. When I was a child, She would share anecdotes from her daily life, involving coworkers and stuff. And she would ask me and remember my questions.

I bet that had a sought impact on my language development.

> The paper is a “wonderful, impactful, and much needed contribution to the literature,”

This finding would be predicted by both nature and nurture. How is it a "much needed contribution"?

That's odd.

Me smol brain grog. I grunt at my boy once a week. His mother/my wife has given up of having a conversation with me.

My boy's a philosophy major who is constantly on the phone walking someone through some game for the fun of it, or debating philosophy. I do not understand half of what he says.

Subhead here is the important and interesting finding, not the headline: "Global data set suggests socioeconomic status does not play a role in children’s language development"

> Many of the kids, who ranged from 2 months to 4 years old

So prior to (most) reading, which dominates vocabulary afterwards.

Kids can “read” books from around 6 months of age, IMHE YMMV

They memorise them and recite them along with mom. I gather, when he gets to decipher the Latin script, it’ll be easier for him to understand the words he’s expecting to read

How long before we see a ChatGPT talking Elmo?

Some times it blows my mind to discover that some bleeding obvious things arent well established. Next thing you're gonna discover that kids with funnier parents tell more jokes, or that kids with angrier parents shout more.

Of course the interesting science would be - nature or nurture?

Eg in a “village” would the kids of quiet parents be exposed all day to all these other talkative people, and therefore the effect disappears? Or is it genetic?

Great identical twins studies would be very interesting here.

And I agree due to the complexity of this, it's one of the most fascinating questions out there. How much and with what kind of likelihood I as a parent can influence my child?

Because due the complexity of it all, it sometimes also happens that bad parents providing bad environment and perhaps bad genes as well, get good children and vice versa. No one likes the ideas of this happening though as it dismisses the idea of responsibility, and no one likes the idea that they won't have 100% control over raising their children.

It would be great to know the exact odds, e.g. if you classified parents into different buckets, how often could it happen that with whatever rules that are perfect environment would it happen that children happen to grow up in a bucket where they aren't with desired characteristics.

Then sometimes identical twins who grow up with same parents, still become different personality wise. What exactly explains that? Is it that one of them just happens to take the leading role in their relationship and the other just balances and the difference between them snowballs because of the dynamic they just built with each other.

It may be obvious, but as a relative HN long timer, I've been hit too many times with the "source please" when making statements based on what I thought were obvious well known things, so studies like these are ammo for those sticklers who insist on seeing the sauce for everything.

The whole point of study is to break down these “obvious” conclusions and make sure we understand the exact causal chain, free of confounding variables. Extremely often something is studied that seems “obvious” and turns out to be anything but.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you sure it's obvious? I have parents that are always joking and what they transmitted me is to hate everything, in my experience people tend to hate the traits they grow up with and to which they're continuously exposed, as I hear often "Who did he take it from?"

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