Busy toy designs reduce the specificity of mothers' references to toy parts during toy play with their toddlers

When a parent is playing with a toy with his or her child, might a toy's "busy" visual design negatively impact the specificity and quality of the parent's talk? In this study, 24 mother-toddler (M = 23.5 months) dyads played with both (a) unmodified visually busy commercial toys and (b) modified visually "simple" versions of these commercial toys. Our focus was on the specificity of mothers' 552 references to the main parts of the toys (i.e., the rings of a stacking ring toy and the blocks of a nesting block toy), which was found to be impacted by the toys' visual design. That is, with simple toys, mothers produced a significantly greater proportion of specific references (e.g., the blue ring) than non-specific references (e.g., this/that one). Indeed, the proportion of specific references was three times greater in play with the simple toys than with the busy toys. Busy toys also reduced the number of references to parts of the toy overall and children's exposure to vocabulary such as colour terms used within specific references. These results underscore that the visual design of toys is an important aspect to consider, particularly in contexts where the goal may be to foster adult-child language and a child's exposure to more information-rich vocabulary terms during toy play with an adult. © 2019, Canadian Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists. All rights reserved.