Reading Comprehension A ?Even if companies are marketing electronic toys as educational, they’re not teaching the babies anything at this time,” said a study’s author, Anna Sosa. She is a Northern Arizona University professor who heads the school’s Child Speech and Language Lab. Sosa and her fellow researchers listened to audio(声频的) recordings of parents playing with their babies — aged 10 months to 16 months. The researchers compared the experiences when the children played with electronic toys, traditional toys such as blocks, or when the children looked at books. What they found was that parents talked less with their babies when the babies played with electronic toys. “The parents talked less, responded less and used fewer content specific words,” Sosa said. Sosa said research showed that how quickly children developed language was often based on what they heard from parents. 揥hen the infants(c幼儿) played with electronic toys, parents said little to their children. But with traditional toys, such as blocks, parents shared the names and descriptions of the animals, colors and shapes as their children played. There was even more information given by parents as their babies looked at the pictures in books,” Sosa said. Sosa is not telling parents to throw out electronic toys. But she said parents should look at their infants’ play with such toys as entertainment, not a learning experience. |