Television and Early Language Acquisition
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1
Emirates College for Advanced Education, United Arab Emirates
Learning language is a significant developmental milestone that children must navigate within the first two years of life. Experience interacting with parents, siblings and others in the environment, as well as with electronic media (e.g., television, video), may affect children's early language acquisition capabilities. Associative word learning, the ability to pair a word to a referent object, is a mechanism thought to enable early language acquisition. In regard to word-pairing ability for children two years and under, what are the effects of 1) time spent watching television and 2) type of television programming?
Television (TV) viewing habits of 18- and 26-month-olds (n = 41) were assessed by a parent questionnaire. A median split was utilized to identify children with either high TV exposure (i.e., 3 hours or more per week) or low TV exposure (i.e., under 3 hours per week). Children were also grouped by the frequency (i.e., regularly, seldom, or never) with which they viewed each of 3 different types of child-directed programming: Baby DVDs (e.g., Baby Einstein series), Educational TV (e.g., Dora the Explorer, Blue's Clues), and Non-educational TV (e.g., Spongebob Squarepants, Hannah Montana). Using the Splitscreen Preferential Looking Paradigm, a video was used to test participants' word-pairing ability for familiar (i.e. book and doll) and novel words (i.e. modi and tiefep).
T-tests and one-way analyses of variance (ANOVA) were conducted to examine the effects of children's television viewing habits on word-pairing ability for both familiar and novel words. A significant effect of television exposure on word-pairing ability for familiar words was found for 18-month-olds. High TV exposure was associated with significantly higher looking times to familiar objects (M = 43.31, SD = 48.6, p < .05) than low TV exposure (M = 2.93, SD = 39.35). No significant effects were found for the frequency with which 18-month-olds viewed Baby DVDs, Educational TV, or Non-educational TV. There were no significant effects of any television exposure measures on word-pairing ability of 26-month-olds for familiar words. A significant effect of Educational TV on word-pairing ability for novel words was found for older children, F(1,14) = 6.41, p < .05. Twenty-six-month-olds who regularly watched Educational TV had significantly higher (p < .05) looking times than children who seldom watched this type of programming, M = 47.85, SD = 43.8, and M = -15, SD = 39.77, respectively. No significant effects were found for weekly TV exposure, Baby DVDs, or Non-educational TV.
Results reveal that all children were able to pair familiar words with referent objects presented in a video but were unable to pair novel words with referent objects before 2 years of age. Word-pairing ability for familiar words at 18 months was related to the amount of television watched in an average week, and experience with children's educational programming at 26 months was related to word-pairing ability for novel words.
Keywords:
language acquisition,
Infant,
preferential looking paradigm,
Television,
screen media
Conference:
3rd International Conference on Educational Neuroscience, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 11 Mar - 12 Mar, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Educational Neuroscience
Citation:
Rashad
FF
(2018). Television and Early Language Acquisition.
Conference Abstract:
3rd International Conference on Educational Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.225.00014
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Received:
25 Feb 2018;
Published Online:
14 Dec 2018.
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Correspondence:
Dr. Fatimah F Rashad, Emirates College for Advanced Education, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, ffrashad@gmail.com