A new study says electronic toys ar

A new study says electronic toys are not helping babies learn.“Even if companies are marketing them as educational, they’re not teaching the babies anything at this time,” said the 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 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 is 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.Why is this important?Sosa said research shows that how quickly children develop language is often based on what they hear from parents. When the infants 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, Sosa said.There was even more information given by parents as their babies looked at the pictures in books, the researcher also said.