According to a study conducted by Tampere University Hospital (TAYS), ample screening time can hinder the linguistic development of young infants.
The study examined the development of speech and linguistic expression in 18- and 24-month-old children and found that as parents and their children’s use of electronic devices increased — so-called display time — children’s vocabulary decreased.
After the invitations of the regional maternity centers, a total of almost 1,700 Finnish-speaking families agreed to participate in the project before the birth of their children. Data were collected in 2013-2015.
To achieve their results, the researchers asked parents to describe their child’s vocabulary, word combinations, speech intelligibility, and pointing their fingers and following instructions.
About two-thirds of young people had a vocabulary of up to 20 words, while about a third spoke less than five words.
At the same time, less than a third had vocabularies of more than 40 words and about 10 percent of infants had vocabularies of 40 to 50 words. The results of the study showed that children’s vocabulary seems to develop more slowly than before Marja Asikainen, Chief Speech Therapist at the University Department of Phonetics and Chief Author of Research.
Screen time
The electronic devices used by parents and children seem to affect a child’s linguistic development. Asikainen said their frequent use can limit conversation and play between parents and their children.
However, the researchers said that electronic devices and media can also be harmless or even help develop a child’s ability to function if they have plenty of time for other activities and the content consumed during the screen is carefully selected.
The use of electronic media involved viewing content on televisions, tablets, or other devices.
The use of the devices may also be particularly harmful to children who face other language developmental challenges, the researchers found.
"The effects of the rapid growth in the use of mobile devices will be visible everywhere in about 10-15 years," Asikainen said, adding that the issue should be investigated further.
The study also took into account how much parents read and study picture books with their children, for example, at bedtime. Vocabulary levels were lower among children who were not read daily according to the study.
A study that was published In the scientific journal Acta Pediatrics, it was carried out in collaboration with the University of Tampere and THL.
Source: The Nordic Page