Mindless chatter actually uses a lot of words in real-life context ("now where did I put that bowl?") while very early reading focuses on supposed school skills like the alphabet and what sounds animals make ("moo!")... and perhaps really it focuses on the school skill of learning to sit there as a passive audience and stare at what adults tell you to stare at.

Or perhaps mindless chatter requires the child to figure out what's going on, instead of just having a simple story be spoon fed.

It seems to me that the headline is very misleading because chatting with children while doing housework is not necessarily "mindless."

True but the study says the chatting can be mindless and still see the results:

This is according to Irish researchers who conducted a study on the impact of bedtime reading on 7,845 nine-month-old infants.

They found that absent-minded conversation was four times better at improving a child's communication skills than reading to them or showing them pictures.

Here is a more in-depth article about why talking to baby is specifically good for them. One cool factoid: apparently infants do not learn language from non-humans! So all those videos that supposedly make them smart... NOT!

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/talking-cure

Thanks for the link.

So many parents bought so many videos when they would have been better off just talking to their kids.

Talking to babies while doing housework is better than reading to them:

http://clt.sagepub.com/content/30/3/303.abstract

1000 Reddit comments:

http://reddit.com/r/science/comments/2r3o5r/absentmindedly_talking_to_babies_while_doing/