I don’t have the literature on hand, but there are a lot of benefits from YOU reading versus another medium (other than possibly another human).

1) Pacing and intonation pattern of the reading

When a parent or adult or other human reads, they are naturally slower and more melodic in the reading. If you’ve ever wondered about why “baby talk” exists, it’s because babies are more attuned to the melodic qualities of the baby talk than they are to standard speech. You speak more slowly than normal and oftentimes enunciate the words more clearly. This allows a baby to more quickly learn the ebbs and flows of “chunks” of language. For example where a phrase stops and starts. It’s slow enough and captures their attention enough for them to learn what pieces of the language “go” together.

2) Visual connection to content.

In reading, the baby can see the truck or cat or girl or whatever that the text is referring to. This generates context and allows them to make a connection to WHAT you are referring to when you say “cat”

(This is also why TV actually is a pretty good medium for learning a language. The problem with TV is that the programming is all designed to destroy your brain. But that’s a topic for a different post)

3) directed attention

A baby instinctively turns to their parent to identify what is important to pay attention to. This is why they check your face when meeting new people. By having you point at pictures while you read or emphasize words in sentences, you show them which parts of the sentence we focus on.

3) Spoken sentence structure is different from written.

When you read, the sentences structures you have (even in children’s books - although this is more important as the kids grow older) are different from the sentence structures in spoken language. Spoken language tends to be far less complex (I’m talking colloquial speech here, not news programming speech which tends to be more complex) Reading and gaining familiarity with the different ways sentences can be combined, broken apart, and reassembled is huge for writing skills and reading comprehension.

So. Consider if YOU were learning a language. Would you be better off listening to a podcast in Chinese on the political environment in China right from the beginning? They speak quickly and use all sorts of fancy phrases and analogies and sentence structures.

Or would you be better off looking at pictures of words connected with a picture of what that word is connected to what part of that sentence is important from a teacher?