Techno for toddlers · Sync Primitive
Children build language out of turns, and out of rhythm.
She makes a sound; you answer it. That back-and-forth predicts how her language network develops1. Rhythm runs on the same timing machinery that speech does, which is why musical play in infancy shows up later in how she processes speech2. Everything we make exists to make those two things happen more often.
Read the book on the floor. Say the word, then stop and wait longer than feels natural. Move to the music with her. That is the product. The rest of this site is the reasoning and the receipts, and every claim on it links to the paper it came from, including the ones where the evidence is thinner than we would like.
Three surfaces, one system
The book comes first
Printed, not on a screen, on purpose. Given the same story, paper produces more back-and-forth talk between a parent and a toddler than a device does3. The book is the object; everything else supports it.
The music is the ambient layer
Published at declared, locked tempi so the pulse in the book, in the app and on the record is the same pulse. Made by people who do this for a living.
The screen is the smallest part
An interactive alphabet with optional narration, built so it stops and waits for her. Toddlers learn words from screens only when the screen responds to them4; a video that merely looks interactive teaches nothing.
This site is free and stays free
The method, the sources, and the limits of those sources. If you read this and buy nothing, we have still done the job.
One alphabet, four ways to read it
The commonest question about alphabet books is whether to say "A, Amp" or "A is for Amp". Both, but not yet. Letter names are meaningless at twelve months; a single word, said on its own with a pause after it, is not.
| Age | What you say | Why that, then |
|---|---|---|
| 0–18m | “Amp.” … “Amp.” | Words at the end of an utterance, followed by silence, are the easiest to pull out of the stream |
| 18m–3y | “Amp. That’s an amp.” | Label, then expand by exactly one step |
| 3–5y | “A is for Amp. A, ah.” | Now the letter can carry a sound, so the letter is worth teaching |
| 5y+ | “An amplifier adds power to a signal without changing its shape.” | The layer that stops the object being outgrown |
The full method, with the sources →
What this is not
- Not a brain-training programme. Nothing here will make a child gifted, and anyone selling you that is selling you something.
- Not a substitute for a clinician. If you have a concern about her hearing or her speech, see a paediatrician or a speech-language pathologist now, not after trying this.
- Not screen-based. The screen part is deliberately the smallest part, and we tell you where the guidance says to keep it.
- Not neutral. We sell a book. You do not need it to use any of the method on this site, and the method is the part that works.
Parents of under-fives are sold a great deal: music classes, right-brain programmes, flashcard systems, subscription play kits. Some of that has evidence behind it and some of it does not, and the difference is knowable. We went and looked →
Sources on this page
- 1Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children's Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain FunctionRomeo et al., Psychological Science, 2018
doi.org/10.1177/0956797617742725 - 2Musical intervention enhances infants' neural processing of temporal structure in music and speechZhao & Kuhl, PNAS, 2016
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1603984113 - 3Differences in Parent-Toddler Interactions With Electronic Versus Print BooksMunzer et al., Pediatrics, 2019
doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2012 - 4Skype Me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn LanguageRoseberry, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, Child Development, 2014
doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12166