Is there actually anything in it?
We didn’t start with research. We started with a word book for our son, made out of photos of his nan and the dog, because nothing on the shelf looked like anyone he knew.
It worked so well we got curious and went looking. Turns out a few people have studied this properly. Here’s the short version.
Familiar faces get more giggles — and more chatter
When researchers filmed families reading at home, children smiled and laughed more with a book made about them. They also talked more than they did with their own favourite book.
Kucirkova, Messer & Whitelock (2013), Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
Words stick better when the book is about them
Preschoolers were read a book with new words hidden in it — some pages personalised, some not. A week later, they remembered more of the words from the personalised pages.
Kucirkova, Messer & Sheehy (2014), First Language
Real photos beat cartoons for little ones
Toddlers found it easier to connect a word to the real thing when they’d seen a photograph. Cartoon versions were the hardest for them to make the leap from.
Ganea, Pickard & DeLoache (2008), reviewed in Frontiers in Psychology
Which all points at the same thing, really: the book isn’t the clever bit — the conversation around it is. We’re just providing an easy way to create it. A picture of Nana gets a child talking in a way a cartoon rabbit doesn’t. That’s the whole idea, and it’s where our name came from.
The truth is, these are small studies, and none of them tested our products. We’re not claiming anything medical and this isn’t a substitute for professional advice — if you’re ever worried about your child’s speech, your health visitor is the person to ask. We just thought it was nice that the research pointed the same way our intuition did.
Work in a nursery or setting and want the proper references? Ask us — happy to send them over.
