Parents of tiny babies: When you’re home with the kid, keep a one-sided conversation going about anything and everything while you’re folding laundry, making dinner, or doing whatever else around the house. A steady stream of idle chatter from mom or dad’s mouth improves the child’s cognitive development, even more so than reading to them does, according to the results of a study recently published in the journal Language Teaching and Therapy.
Aisling Murray, of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Ireland, initially set out to investigate the importance of reading, and whether reading to infants was associated with higher scores on indicators of cognitive development than other language-based interactions between parent and infant, like talking. She expected that reading would win out; the question, really, was how much better reading was for language skills.