With our mobile technology, we listen to podcasts while washing dishes and catch up on news while checking out at Trader Joe's. Sometimes, however, our multi-tasking is not intentional, as when we receive a text during supper or a phone call while reading aloud to our children.
There has been much written about media use by children. But what are the impacts of media use by parents in the presence of their children? What happens when conversations with our children are interrupted by media?
In an article published recently in Developmental Psychologyopens in new window, psychologists Jessa Reed, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Golinkoff (2017) explored the effects of cell-phone interruptions during parent-child interactions on toddlers' word learning.
Parents and their 2-year old children participated in a lab-based study at Temple University. Before the study began, an experimenter demonstrated two new actions (bouncing a baby doll on one's knee and shaking a silent maraca) and labeled each ("blicking" and "frepping") for the parent.
The experimenter asked the mothers to teach each word (here verbs), one at a time, to their children. Mothers would know when to move from the first word to the next when the experimenter called them on a mobile phone. And sometimes, the experimenter mentioned, she would just call to chat.
Each child would be taught one verb in an uninterrupted condition and one verb in an interrupted condition. When the teaching period was uninterrupted, mothers had 60 seconds to demonstrate the action to their children and use the new verb in a sentence.
When the teaching was interrupted, mothers once again had 60-seconds in total to teach the new verb. This time, however, the teaching session was broken into two segments: An initial 30 seconds of teaching was followed by a 30-second phone call during which the experimenter chatted with each mother about her morning coffee routine, followed by 30 more seconds of teaching.
There was no difference in the amount of time that parents devoted to teaching the verbs and no difference in the number of times children heard the target verb across teaching conditions.
After the teaching phase, children were tested for their knowledge of the two words. They watched a video while seated on their mothers' laps. Two videos played side-by-side while the voice-over asked the child to find one of the actions (e.g., "Find frepping!"). Each video pair included one scene in which a Sesame Street character engaged in the target action and one action that did not match the label.
Would children look more often at the correct target when the training was uninterrupted? The length of children's eye gaze patterns (coded off line) towards the two scenes offered the answer.
Results suggested that children only learned the words in the uninterrupted condition — when the teaching period was not interrupted by a cell phone call. Interruptions of the sort that we experience everyday from calls and texts that randomly poke into our dynamically unfolding social conversations derail conversations and child learning.
Word learning depends on responsive, back and forth conversations that are both timely and meaningful. The quality, not just the quantity of language input to the child matters for language learning. A study explores the impact of media use by parents in the presence of their children.
Citation
- Reed, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2017). Learning on hold: Cell phones sidetrack parent-child interactions. Developmental Psychology, 53(8), 1428–1436. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000292
Note: This article is in the Developmental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Developmental Psychology topic area.