Do Babies Learn From Baby Media?

Research Report Do Babies Learn From Baby Media? Psychological Science 21(11) 1570–1574 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0956797610384145 http://pss.sagepub.com Judy S. DeLoache1, Cynthia Chiong1, Kathleen Sherman1, Nadia Islam1, Mieke Vanderborght1, Georgene L.Troseth2, Gabrielle A. Strouse2, and Katherine O’Doherty2 1 University of Virginia and 2Vanderbilt University Abstract In recent years, parents in the United States and worldwide have purchased enormous numbers of videos and DVDs designed and marketed for infants, many assuming that their children would benefit from watching them. We examined how many new words 12- to 18-month-old children learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for 4 weeks at home. The most important result was that children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words from their monthlong exposure to it than did a control group. The highest level of learning occurred in a no-video condition in which parents tried to teach their children the same target words during everyday activities. Another important result was that parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children had learned from it. We conclude that infants learn relatively little from infant media and that their parents sometimes overestimate what they do learn. Keywords infant media, infant learning Received 10/1/09; Revision accepted 5/3/10 One of the most remarkable marketing phenomena of recent history was ignited by the 1997 release of the first Baby Einstein video (The Baby Einstein Co., Littleton, CO), which was followed by a host of other videos and DVDs designed and marketed specifically for infants and very young children. American parents alone spend hundreds of millions of dollars yearly on these products, with the Baby Einstein series leading in popularity and sales worldwide. Most companies that market these DVDs feature quotes from parents touting the virtues of the company’s products. In these testimonials on Web sites and in advertisements, parents frequently mention the remarkable degree of attention that children pay to the DVDs (as well as the fact that their children’s absorption in the DVDs enables them to get household chores done and even take the occasional shower). Prominently featured are parent testimonials that their children learn a great deal from watching infant DVDs. Our own experience with parents of young children has led us to suspect that a substantial proportion believe that infants benefit from commercial media products, and recent research indicates that 40% of mothers of young children believe that their children learn from television (Rideout, 2007). But how well do infants actually learn from visual media? Because development typically proceeds at a very rapid pace in the first years of life, parents may misattribute ordinary developmental progress to their children’s media exposure. For example, on one commercial Web site, a parent reported that her 18-month-old child had very few words until she started watching one of the company’s videos, at which point her vocabulary “suddenly blossomed.” However, a very welldocumented phenomenon in early language development is the “word spurt,” a rapid increase in the acquisition of new words during the second year of life (e.g., Benedict, 1979; Goldfield & Reznick, 1990). It would be easy for parents to misattribute their children’s sudden linguistic advances to recent video experience. Although several empirical studies have examined the relation between early television viewing and a variety of outcome measures, most have been large-scale surveys yielding correlational data (e.g., Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003; Schmidt, Rich, Rifas-Shiman, Oken, & Taveras, 2009; Zimmerman, Christakis, & Meltzoff, 2007). Only a relatively small number of laboratory studies have examined specific aspects of young children’s interaction with visual media (see Anderson & Pempek, 2005; DeLoache & Chiong, 2009). Corresponding Author: Judy S. DeLoache, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904 E-mail: [email protected] Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com at CENTENARY COLLEGE on November 13, 2010 1571 Learning From Baby Media Further, only a few of those studies have specifically focused on infants’ learning from video. In one such study (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003), 9-month-olds from English-speaking families watched several presentations, either live or video, of an adult speaking Mandarin. A month later, the researchers tested whether this exposure had prolonged the infants’ sensitivity to the Mandarin speech sounds. Only children whose Mandarin exposure had occurred in live interactions showed any impact of that experience. Laboratory studies of infants’ imitation of simple actions presented on video have established that 12- to 30-month-olds are able to reproduce a modest number of observed actions (e.g., Barr & Hayne, 1999; Hayne, Herbert, & Simcock, 2003; McCall, Parke, & Kavanaugh, 1977). Imitation is substantially better, however, when children experience the same demonstrations live. Young children’s word learning from commercial television has also been examined. A large-scale parent survey reported a negative correlation between vocabulary size and television exposure: For every hour of baby media that infants between 8 and 16 months of age watched on their own, they were reported to know 6 to 8 fewer words (Zimmerman et al., 2007). Krcmar, Grela, and Lin (2007) obtained similar results in a laboratory study, in which children under 22 months of age learned few object names presented on a clip from a Teletubbies television episode. In a recent experimental investigation of early learning from video, Robb, Richert, and Wartella (2009) assessed word learning from home viewing of a commercial DVD designed to teach words to young children. According to parent reports, the 12- to 15-month-old participants learned relatively few of the words featured on the DVD: Children who had substantial exposure to it performed no better than did those with none. These results are intriguing, but the fact that the primary data were parent reports is of some concern. Accordingly, we conducted an experiment using objective testing to directly examine the extent to which infants learn from a very popular commercial infant DVD promoted to foster word learning. Six aspects of the study were designed to ensure a highly valid assessment of the potential for early learning from video: (a) The entire experiment was conducted in the children’s own homes. (b) The conditions mimicked everyday situations in which young children view videos. (c) A best-selling video was used. (d) The children received extensive exposure to the video. (e) They were tested for their understanding of the specific words featured on the video. (f) The tester was blind to the condition to which each child had been randomly assigned. Method Participants Participants were 72 infants between 12 and 18 months of age (M = 14.7 months). They were recruited from a large metropolitan area and a small city. The sample was predominantly White and middle-class. None of the infants had had any exposure to the target DVD. Eighteen children (including approximately equal numbers of girls and boys) were randomly assigned to each of four conditions. Materials A best-selling commercial DVD designed and marketed for infants from “12 months of age and up” was used in the research. The 39-min DVD depicts a variety of scenes of a house and yard. A voice labels common household objects, each of which is named three times, with several minutes intervening between the repetitions of a given label. In addition, during the first and last labeling of a given object, a person is shown producing a manual sign for the object. Conditions In the three experimental conditions, the experimenter made three home visits to each family. During the first visit, the experimenter gave detailed oral and written instructions to the parents. The experimental conditions included two video conditions: video with interaction and video with no interaction. In both of these conditions, parents gave their children substantial experience with the DVD in their own homes over 4 weeks. To ensure that they followed the instructions, we asked them to complete a daily log of their child’s experience with the video. Parents in the parent-teaching (nonvideo) condition estimated how often they had attempted to teach their children the target words. On the second and third home visits in all three of these conditions, the experimenter checked to make sure the parents had been following the protocol. In the video-with-interaction condition, the child and a parent watched the DVD together at least five times a week over a 4-week period, for a total of 10 or more hours of viewing time in 20 or more viewing episodes. (Some advertisements for baby videos recommend that parents watch with their children.) Parents were instructed to interact with their child in whatever way seemed natural to them while viewing the video. This condition mimicked the common everyday experience of young children and parents watching television together. In the video-with-no-interaction condition, the children watched the video alone, but had the same total amount of exposure to it as did the children in the video-with-interaction condition. (The parents were almost always in the room with their infants, but were not watching television with them.) This condition mimicked another common situation, in which young children watch television on their own while their parents are nearby but engaged in other activities. In the parent-teaching condition, the children were not exposed to the video at all. Instead, the parents were given a list of the 25 words featured on the video and were instructed simply to “try to teach your child as many of these words as you can in whatever way seems natural to you.” Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com at CENTENARY COLLEGE on November 13, 2010 1572 DeLoache et al. The fourth condition, in which there was no intervention, was the control condition. It provided a baseline of normal vocabulary growth against which performance in the three intervention groups could be compared. criterion minimized the likelihood that children would be counted as knowing a word after simply guessing correctly. Parents in the video conditions completed a brief questionnaire concerning their and their child’s experience with the video. Testing Results During the initial home visit, each child was tested for knowledge of 13 of the 25 words featured on the video in order to establish an individualized set of target words for that child. (As Table S1 in the Supplemental Material available online shows, children in the target age range perform around or below chance when tested for their knowledge of the majority of these words.) On each of 13 trials, the child was shown a pair of replica objects—a target representing an object featured in the video (e.g., clock, table, tree) and a distractor that did not appear in the video (e.g., fan, plate, fence). The experimenter named the target and asked the child to point to the appropriate object (e.g., “Can you show me the table?”). The names of the objects that a child failed to identify became that child’s individualized set of target words. The number of target words ranged from 5 to 12; the mean number (6.4–6.9) did not differ across the four groups. On the final visit, the child’s knowledge of his or her target words was tested to determine how much word learning had taken place over the 4 weeks. The testing was conducted in the same way as in the initial visit, except that two trials were given for each of the child’s target words, with the words presented in one order for the first set of trials and in the reverse order for the second. To be credited with knowing a word, the child had to choose the correct object on both trials; this Figure 1 shows the percentage of their target words that the children got correct on the posttest. Only the performance of the parent-teaching group was above chance (p < .05). The result of primary importance is clear: Children who had extensive exposure to a popular infant video over a full month, either with a parent or alone, did not learn any more new words than did children with no exposure to the video at all. The absence of learning from experience with the video was not due to lack of attention to it. Representative comments from the logs of parents whose children were in the video groups include the following: “She was practically glued to the screen today”; “She was very quiet today—stared intently at the screen and ignored me when I asked her to talk”; “She loves the blasted thing. It’s crack for babies!” As Figure 1 shows, performance was highest in the parentteaching group—those children who had no exposure to the video, but whose parents had attempted to teach them new words during everyday interactions. Preliminary examination of the individual scores indicated that the data were not normally distributed, so a median test was performed on the proportion of target words that the children in the four conditions identified on the posttest. There was a significant overall difference among the groups, χ2(3, N = 72) = 10.03, p < .05. Post 60 Percentage Correct 50 40 30 20 10 0 Parent Teaching Video With Interaction Video With No Interaction Control Condition Fig. 1. Children’s mean performance on the posttest as a function of group. Each child was tested on an individualized set of target words. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean. Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com at CENTENARY COLLEGE on November 13, 2010 1573 Learning From Baby Media hoc tests indicated that the performance of the parent-teaching group was significantly better than that of all three of the other groups—video-with-interaction group: χ2(1, N = 36) = 4.0, p < .05; video-with-no-interaction group: χ2(1, N = 36) = 11.11, p = .001; and control group: χ2(1, N = 36) = 4.0, p < .05. Neither of the video conditions differed from the control condition. Thus, significantly more learning occurred in the context of everyday parent-child interactions than in front of television screens. Finally, the parents’ assessment of how much their children had learned from the DVD was unrelated to the children’s performance on the posttest: Children whose parents thought that they had learned a substantial amount from their experience with the DVD performed no better than did children of less sanguine parents. There was, however, a significant correlation (r = .64, p < .01) between parents’ own liking for the DVD and their estimate of how much their children had learned: The more a parent liked the DVD, the more he or she believed the child had learned from it. change to that experience, thereby overestimating the impact of the videos on their children’s development. Second, the degree to which babies actually learn from baby videos is negligible. Acknowledgments We thank Monica Ehrbacher for her very helpful statistical advice. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. Funding This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant HD-25271, as well as by National Science Foundation Grant 0819508, both to the first author. Supplemental Material Additional supporting information may be found at http://pss.sagepub .com/content/by/supplemental-data Discussion The results of this study provide a clear answer to our original question: Infants between 12 and 18 months of age learned very little from a highly popular media product promoted for this age group. Even with the substantial amount of exposure that they had to the video, the infants learned only a few of the words featured on it. Because great care was taken to ensure that the video-viewing conditions were as natural as possible, the results should be generalizable to young children’s everyday experience. These results are consistent with a body of theory and research that has established that very young children often fail to use information communicated to them via symbolic media, including pictures, models, and video (e.g., DeLoache, 2004; Troseth, Pierroutsakos, & DeLoache, 2004). For example, 2-year-olds who watch a live video of an adult hiding a desirable toy in the room next-door fail to find the toy when encouraged to search for it immediately afterward (Troseth, 2003a, 2003b; Troseth & DeLoache, 1998). This and related results indicate that infants and very young children have difficulty understanding the relation between what they see on a screen and the real world. An additional finding from this experiment is directly relevant to the possibility that parents may misattribute normal developmental progress to their infants’ video exposure. Parents who had a favorable attitude toward the DVD thought that their children had learned more from it than did parents who were less positively disposed to the DVD. There was, in fact, no difference in how many words were learned by the children of these two groups of parents. This result suggests that much of the enthusiasm expressed in parent testimonials about baby video products is misplaced. In summary, the research reported here supports two important conclusions. First, parents whose infants have experience with baby videos tend to misattribute normal developmental References Anderson, D.R., & Pempek, T.A. (2005). Television and very young children. American Behavioral Scientist, 48, 505–522. Barr, R., & Hayne, H. (1999). Developmental changes in imitation from television during infancy. Child Development, 70, 1067– 1081. Benedict, H. (1979). Early lexical development: Comprehension and production. Journal of Child Language, 6, 183–200. DeLoache, J.S. (2004). Becoming symbol-minded. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 66–70. DeLoache, J.S., & Chiong, C. (2009). Babies and baby media. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1115–1135. Goldfield, B.A., & Reznick, J.S. (1990). Early lexical acquisition: Rate, content, and the vocabulary spurt. Journal of Child Language, 17, 171–184. Hayne, H., Herbert, J., & Simcock, G. (2003). Imitation from television by 24- and 30-month-olds. Developmental Science, 6, 254–261. Krcmar, M., Grela, B., & Lin, K. (2007). Can toddlers learn vocabulary from television? An experimental approach. Media Psychology, 10, 41–63. Kuhl, P.K., Tsao, F.M., & Liu, H.M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 100, 9096–9101. McCall, R.B., Parke, R.D., & Kavanaugh, R.D. (1977). Imitation of live and televised models by children one to three years of age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 42(5, Serial No. 173). Rideout, V. (2007). Parents, children, and media. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Rideout, V.J., Vandewater, E.A., & Wartella, E.A. (2003). Zero to six: Electronic media in the lives of infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com at CENTENARY COLLEGE on November 13, 2010 1574 DeLoache et al. Robb, M., Richert, R., & Wartella, E. (2009). Just a talking book? Word learning from watching baby videos. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 27–45. Schmidt, M.E., Rich, M., Rifas-Shiman, S.L., Oken, E., & Taveras, E.M. (2009). Television viewing in infancy and child cognition at 3 years of age in a US cohort. Pediatrics, 123, 370–375. Troseth, G.L. (2003a). Getting a clear picture: Young children’s understanding of a televised image. Developmental Science, 6, 247–253. Troseth, G.L. (2003b). TV guide: 2-year-olds learn to use video as a source of information. Developmental Psychology, 39, 140–150. Troseth, G.L., & DeLoache, J.S. (1998). The medium can obscure the message: Young children’s understanding of video. Child Development, 69, 950–965. Troseth, G.L., Pierroutsakos, S.L., & DeLoache, J.S. (2004). From the innocent to the intelligent eye: The early development of pictorial competence. In R.V. Kail (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior, Volume 32 (pp. 1–35). New York, NY: Academic Press. Zimmerman, F.J., Christakis, D.A., & Meltzoff, A. (2007). Television and DVD/video viewing in children younger than 2 years. Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, 69, 473–479. Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com at CENTENARY COLLEGE on November 13, 2010