I fail to see how videogames can be the main link for speech problems amongst young children when compared with television or film. When I was young and played videogames with friends we would communicate far more than if we were to sit and watch anything on television.

I would say that communication is a vital point for some of us older gamers in the current videogame trend with online gaming. If anything, the internet and texting is the main culprit in modern society.

Lets just be reminded that 'videogames' are the latest fad headline grabber.

And if you head over to the telegraph site the word 'videogames' only appears on the headline.

The article on the Mail website only has this to say about games:

"He (Tory MP John Bercow) called on parents to strike a balance between screen-based activities such as television and computer games and family activities, including traditional mealtimes."

I expect the next article to appear on MCV to be 'Burner dismisses Videogames as fad'

Err, I have been playing video games as soon as my hands could hold the snes controller.
The only speech problems I have are mumbling...Which I get from my dad lol.
So yeah....No....Just no.....

Yup, because societal speech patterns never, ever change, kids aren't adopting their parents' speech patterns in the slightest.

Maybe they should be looking not just at the Toddler themselves, but at the environment they are raised in before jumping to conclusions about where to point fingers.

After all, it's a pretty dodgy investigation that announces its results before it has even taken place, can you say '"fixed"?

While 'video games' make this an eye catching headline, it sounds like the actual problem has very, very little to do with games (esp among poor children under the age of two, who are unlikely to have the expensive hardware needed for gaming).

A better summary would have been: Busy parents and broken families lead to less in-household communication and thus less practice for young children.

Well, this is just how the media is.
Whenever there's a problem with children's health, they usually blame video games.
This is unfair.
One thing that shows how ignorant this article is would be the paragraph:

"According to The Mail, fewer than one in ten children in disadvantaged areas know even one nursery rhyme."

Notice how it says, "disadvantaged areas."
The reason that they don't know a nursery rhyme, is because they're in these "disadvantaged areas."

Another thing, I remember that I played a lot of video games as a small child.
The only thing that's wrong with my voice is that it's really deep for my age.

Of course we all know the idiot media are going to blow this outlandish comparison completely out of proportion.
I can just imagine the headlines......"Child plays GTA, forgets how to speak".

of course the REAL problem are memes:

'I can haz cheezburger' and other such nonsense...In fact we can stamp this out by refusing to let people keep cats and cameras.....and the internet.

Anyway, the point I was making on an earlier post is that you need to read the report before passing any judgement and typically MCV is fanning the flames, not by provoking a debate with a well inforned article, but by the chinese whispers style of reporting.