Speech and language researcher Dr. Anna Sosa compared electronic toys, books and traditional toys, and found that the noisiest toys produced the quietest rooms: fewer words, fewer turns, fewer responses from the adults who matter most.
Dr. Anna Sosa is Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northern Arizona University, where she directs research on early language environments: the everyday soundscape of words, replies and back-and-forth exchanges in which a baby's language actually grows. Her field sits at the practical end of language science. It is not concerned with abstract theories of grammar so much as with what is really happening, minute by minute, between a parent and a child on the living room floor.
That focus matters, because the living room floor is where the modern toy industry has staked its biggest claim. Toys that light up, sing, and talk are routinely sold as language teachers. Sosa's contribution was to stop arguing about this in the abstract and measure it: put real parents and real infants in front of different kinds of toys, record what happens, and count.
In a controlled comparison published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2016, Sosa gave parent-infant pairs three kinds of play materials and recorded their interactions at home. The first set was electronic toys: the familiar kind with lights, songs and talking features, the kind whose packaging promises letters, numbers and first words. The second was books. The third was traditional toys, the silent, hands-on sort. The recordings were then analysed for the ingredients that language research cares about most: how many words the adult said, how many conversational turns the pair took, and how often the parent responded to the child.
The result ran in one consistent direction. During play with electronic toys, parents said fewer words, the pairs took fewer conversational turns, and parents produced fewer responses to their child than during play with books or traditional toys. The toys that talked the most were accompanied by humans who talked the least. The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, gives the mechanism a plain logic: when the electronic toy does the talking, the humans do less. A toy that fills every silence with a jingle or a recorded phrase leaves no silence for a parent to fill, and no gap for a baby to babble into and be answered.
The mirror image of the finding is the encouraging half. The quietest toys produced the richest conversations. Books did well, as you would expect. But plain traditional toys also comfortably outperformed the electronic ones, because a silent object hands the entire job of narration, naming and responding back to the people in the room, and people, unlike recordings, reply to the specific child in front of them.
The source
Sosa, A. V. (2016). Association of the Type of Toy Used During Play With the Quantity and Quality of Parent-Infant Communication. JAMA Pediatrics · Read the original
Language in the early years is built from exactly the materials Sosa counted. A young child learns to talk by hearing words from a familiar voice, taking turns in tiny proto-conversations, and having their own sounds and gestures responded to. Researchers sometimes call this loop "serve and return": the child serves, the adult returns. Sosa's study suggests that the type of toy on the floor changes how often that loop runs. Not because electronic toys harm children directly, but because they quietly displace the thing that helps: the parent's own voice.
Honesty about the limits is part of the deal. This was one controlled comparison, and the word in its title is association. It measured what parents and infants did during play, not the children's vocabulary years later, and it cannot prove that a house full of talking toys causes slower language. What it shows, cleanly, is that the richest known ingredient of early language, responsive back-and-forth talk, was measurably thinner around electronic toys. Given that the entire sales pitch of those toys is language, that is a finding parents deserve to hear.
The guilt-free reading is this: no single toy will make or break a child's language, and a talking teapot at Granny's house is not an emergency. The practical lever is simply which toys dominate the daily routine. If most play happens around things that leave room for your voice, the loop runs thousands of extra times a year, and you do not have to perform anything. Ordinary chat while playing is precisely what the research is counting.
Picture the same fifteen minutes twice. In the first version, a toddler presses a button and a plastic console sings the alphabet at her. The lights flash, the song loops, and her mother, who was about to say something, doesn't. There is nothing to add. The toy has the floor. In the second version, the same toddler holds a beech block, turns it over, and bangs it on the rug. The block says nothing at all, and so her mother does: "Bang! That's a loud one. Shall we put it on top?" The child offers a sound back, the tower wobbles, both of them hold their breath, and when it falls there is a shared shout and a rebuild. Count the exchanges in each scene and you have Sosa's data set, re-enacted on your own carpet.
This is the quiet genius of the silent toy: it produces the talkative parent. Wood does not interrupt. A stacking tower has no script, so the script gets written aloud by the two people playing, in the accent and vocabulary of that actual family, perfectly pitched to that actual child, which is something no recording can do. The weight of the block in a small hand, the knock of one piece on another, the pause before the tower tips: each is a gap in the soundtrack, and gaps are where conversation lives. A shelf of traditional wooden toys → is, seen through Sosa's findings, a set of conversation starters that never talk over anyone.
Jaques of London has been making toys on this principle since 1795, which makes it the world's oldest games company, and in all that time, through the invention of croquet in 1851 and the creation of the Staunton chess set in 1849, it has never made a toy that speaks. That was not a scientific decision two centuries ago. It simply reflected a truth that Sosa's recordings have now measured: the play was never meant to come from the toy. It comes from the people around it, and a well-made wooden toy → just gives them somewhere to meet.
The original paper is short, readable and worth five minutes of any parent's time: Association of the Type of Toy Used During Play With the Quantity and Quality of Parent-Infant Communication, JAMA Pediatrics (2016). On this site, our guide to wooden toys versus plastic takes the comparison further, reducing screen time for toddlers covers the wider family soundscape, and why real play matters sets Sosa's finding alongside the broader evidence.
Sosa's study did not find that electronic toys damage children. It found that while families played with them, the proven ingredients of language growth, adult words, conversational turns and parental responses, all dropped compared with books and traditional toys. The sensible conclusion is not panic but proportion: a few noisy toys in the mix are fine, but the toys your child reaches for most often should be the kind that leave room for your voice.
Recorded speech is a poor substitute for live speech, because it cannot respond. Early language grows fastest through back-and-forth exchange: the child makes a sound, and a real person answers that sound, at that moment, about that thing. A toy reciting the alphabet does none of this, and in Sosa's recordings it also reduced how much the parents themselves said. The label promises teaching; the measurement showed displacement.
No, and trying to would exhaust anyone. The point of the study is gentler: around quiet toys, ordinary talk happened naturally, without parents being coached to do anything. Comment when something is interesting, answer when your child offers a sound or a look, and let silences breathe. The toy's job is simply not to crowd out the conversation that wants to happen anyway.
Books produced very rich talk, which is one more reason to keep reading together daily. But traditional toys also clearly beat electronic toys on words, turns and responses, and toys earn hours of a young child's day that books usually do not. The practical takeaway is both: read often, and make sure the default toy basket is mostly the silent, hands-on kind.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.