вЂњOnce the thrill wears off they tend to use the dolls in their own way.вЂќ That way, she continued, is for youngsters to switch off the interactive mechanisms, and invent their own roles and vocabularies for the dolls. вЂњAs I walk by rooms I seldom hear the children playing them,вЂќ Dutton said. Indeed, some children tend to вЂњdeactivateвЂќ interactive dolls they turn off the dolls and turn on their own imaginations, observed Carol Dutton, a child-development specialist at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in West Los Angeles. Kids can make anything into anything: sticks into guns, cartons into houses, tin cans into drums and animated interactive dolls into plain old-fashioned dolls of yesteryear. The taped vocabularies run more toward stories and songs children can share by reading books that come with the dolls, or by following the taped instructions spoken by the dolls. Some microchips require dolls to speak at regular intervals, others say something and then pause until the child responds by moving the doll or making a noise to trigger another phrase, and some dolls combine both features. Microchip-brain dolls tend to encourage more constant interaction than their tape-brain cousins because microchip vocabularies offer a word or phrase at a time, pausing to let a child respond. The makers of Teddy Ruxpin this year have added animated Snoopy and Charlie Brown dolls to their family of toys with tape-recorded tales to tell. Grubby, who became available this year, talks with Teddy. If Teddy needs company, he can be wired to Grubby, an eight-legged, creature whose conversation and animation are controlled-like TeddyвЂ™s-by the tape in the bearвЂ™s player. His mouth and eye movements synchronize with the words of songs and adventure stories he tells. Unlike Baby Talk, whose vocabulary rests in a silicon microchip, Teddy RuxpinвЂ™s wisdom stems from special tapes inserted in a player built into his back. For example, thereвЂ™s Teddy Ruxpin, the fuzzy bear who last Christmas came out of nowhere (the company that makes him didnвЂ™t even exist 10 months before Christmas) to create a new market.

Dolls that talk