Screentime is a way bigger part of kids’ lives than it used to be, and that’s changing the way babies and toddlers learn to speak.
Sarah Kucker, an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, studies word learning and cognitive development. She led research that found screentime can limit kids' vocabulary and change which words they pick up.
Kucker spoke with KERA's Miranda Suarez about why that matters and what parents can do to combat the effects of screentime.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The importance of physical interaction when kids learn language
If a child has to learn what the word duck is, and they get this little yellow bath toy and they're playing with it in real life, they're gonna be able to feel the rubbery texture or the plasticky texture of it. They're gonna to be able see it from 3D angles. They're going to see the round shape of the head, the colors of it. They might even hear it squeak a little.
They're getting multiple sensory inputs about that. All of that information is really helpful for them to take the word "duck," and that sound, and map it to this object and learn that word-object pairing.
But if you're exposed to a duck on a tablet, and you just see this 2D image, or even a cartoon image of it, you don't get the touch. You don't get trying to eat it and the taste and the texture of it.
So the information you're getting is different. That means that the way that you learn — that process — has to be a little bit different as well. Sometimes, we find that that's not quite as robust.
Over time, if you do this over and over and again for lots and lots of different words, that's going to have these cascading effects where the overall vocabulary ends up being lower, or the connections aren't aren't built up as quickly.
It may take longer for children to learn and learn words and to communicate in the ways that that we think about.
How screentime is changing kids' vocabulary
What we found is the children who of lots of screen time, they have lower overall vocabularies, and that's work that's been replicated from lots of different people. But we also found differences in the types of words that they learned.
Children with a more screen time, they also know fewer body part words — things like nose, ear, eye, fingers. And those body part words end up actually being some of the first words that children learn, and they're facilitated by physical interaction.
So when mom or dad or the caretaker is working with the kid, or playing with the kid, they're gonna be like, "Oh, your little toe! Here's your finger, I got your nose!" They're going to touch the kid's nose when they do that, and that physical touch really helps to solidify it.
Kids who have lots of screen time, our hypothesis is, is they're not getting that physical interaction. So things like body parts, that rely a lot on that physical interaction, are going down.
But we interestingly found higher knowledge for furniture words and people words in children who had lots of screentime.
We did some quick preliminary analysis that lots of children's videos, they will have lots of people words in them. So they'll be talking about their friend or mommy or daddy or the character name in that video. We think that potentially is helping those children keep those words.
The key is that you're finding different structures of vocabulary for children who are exposed to screens a lot versus children who were not. And if you think they get different environments, that starts to make sense.
Why that change is a problem
What we know from typical language development, outside of screens, is that the structure of your vocabulary is really important.
To learn a verb and an action word, you also have to know the noun. So if I want to say "The bunny jumped," to know jumped, I need to know bunny.
We also know that children learning lots of nouns ... That's really helpful for building a good foundation of vocabulary as well. It helps children learn that there are categories. So when I say duck, it's not just the one rubber duck in my bathtub. It refers to a whole group of ducks.
If you're exposed to tablets, you're maybe not getting that same structure and that could have later consequences — can you learn the next word in the sequence?
Guidance for parents
As much as I want to sit here and say, oh, this is the exact number of minutes that your children should have, it is always more complicated than that, because every family is different, every child is different.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has guidelines, and they say, under one year should have very minimal use. Under two years, max, like, an hour or so.
But not all media is actually equal, either. Watching a video that the kid just stares at for an hour is not as good as having an hour of talking with grandma on FaceTime.
You don't want the kid to just sit passively in front of a video and just passively watch. Language is interactive, so you want something that's interactive.
There's not a magic number. Less is better, but on the flip side, I always want to tell parents, if your child has a screen for five minutes, it is not going to ruin their life.
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org.
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