Linebarger - Screen Media and Language Development in Infants and Toddlers

Developmental Review 30 (2010) 176–202

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Developmental Review

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Screen media and language development in infants andtoddlers: An ecological perspective

Deborah L. Linebarger *, Sarah E. VaalaUniversity of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 9 March 2010Available online 8 April 2010

Keywords:InfantsToddlersLanguage developmentScreen mediaEcological contexts

0273-2297/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Indoi:10.1016/j.dr.2010.03.006

* Corresponding author.E-mail address: [email protected] (D.L

a b s t r a c t

The abilities to understand and use language represent two of themost important developmental competencies that children mustmaster during the first 3 years of life. Over the past decade, screenmedia content directed at infants and toddlers has dramaticallyincreased. As a result, infants’ and toddlers’ time spent with mediahas also notably increased (i.e., 1–2 h per day). At present, there islimited empirical knowledge regarding how screen media influ-ence infants’ and toddlers’ language development. In this review,we contend that infants and toddlers are capable of learning fromscreen media. This learning is dependent upon the confluence ofthree distinct but interrelated factors: attributes of the child; char-acteristics of the screen media stimuli; and the varied environmen-tal contexts surrounding the child’s screen media use. To examinethese interrelated factors, we have adopted an ecological frame-work in which a young child’s language skills develop from thereciprocal transactions between the child and the broader environ-mental contexts in which a child is situated or operates. Screenmedia effects are dependent on the degree to which media contentresembles infants’ and toddlers’ real-life experiences including theuse of simple stories and familiar objects or routines. Repeatedexposure also helps infants and toddlers learn both the formatand the content of screen media and can even ameliorate negativeeffects associated with viewing particular content. Finally, thepresence of a competent co-viewer appears to boost babies’ lan-guage learning from screen media, much like the ways these pro-cesses facilitate learning in live scenarios.

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D.L. Linebarger, S.E. Vaala / Developmental Review 30 (2010) 176–202 177

Introduction

The abilities to understand and use language represent two of the most important developmentalcompetencies that children must master during the first 3 years of life (Gauvain, 2001; Hart & Risley,1992, 1995; Hoff, 2006). More generally, developmental competencies are established and nurturedthrough infants’ transactions with multiple persons, objects, events, and other environmental factorspresent in their everyday settings (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Carta & Greenwood, 1987; Greenwood, Car-ta, & Atwater, 1991). Early language development is stimulated by the linguistic input that an infanthears on a regular basis. The most proximal and influential of these sources are parents, siblings, otherchildren and adults living in the immediate household, and the myriad of other environmental soundsto which infants are exposed. Media stimuli, in turn, encompass the visual, verbal, and visual/verbalcontent that can be delivered via multiple devices.1 This review will examine the relations among in-fants’ and toddlers’ language development and the roles that visual/verbal devices play in that develop-ment. These visual/verbal devices have been more broadly categorized as screen media.

Children’s developmental trajectories associated with language learning are established early, areself-sustaining, and are resistant to change (Carey & Gelman, 1991; Farkas & Beron, 2004; Hart & Risley,1992, 1995, 2003; Newport, 1990; Stanovich, 1986). The language domain during the first 3 years of lifeis also developmentally privileged (i.e., infants and toddlers are extraordinarily good at acquiring lan-guage; Brown, 1990; Carey & Gelman, 1991; Newport, 1990) and, thus, is uniquely sensitive to thequantity and quality of the linguistic input heard from both person and object input sources. Early lan-guage ability, then, has been implicated in the development of multiple academic and social skills dur-ing preschool, primary school, and beyond. Such skills include later receptive and expressive language,spelling and writing, literacy skills, general verbal ability, IQ, numeracy, and the prerequisite socialskills needed to facilitate and sustain interaction and communication with others (Bradley, Caldwell,& Rock, 1988; Schneider & Bryne, 1985; Wachs, 1992; Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994).

There is considerable evidence that children two and older who watch educational television dolearn media-presented vocabulary and then are able to transfer specific learning to more generalizedlanguage and school readiness gains, stronger narrative abilities, higher academic self concept, andmore leisure book reading when a teenager (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright, 2001;Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009; Rice, 1984; Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990; Rice & Woodsmall,1988; Wright et al., 2001). In these studies, earlier viewing (at age two) more strongly predicts theseoutcomes compared with later or concurrent viewing (Wright et al., 2001). With the booming marketfor infant- and toddler-directed media products and parents’ beliefs that these products may confersome academic advantages to their young children, researchers have shifted their focus to understand-ing whether and how screen media impact language development for children under two.

In this review, we contend that infants and toddlers are capable of learning from screen media. Thislearning is dependent upon the confluence of three distinct but interrelated factors: attributes of thechild; characteristics of the screen media stimuli; and the varied environmental contexts surroundingthe child’s screen media use. To examine these interrelated factors, we have adopted an ecological frame-work in which a young child’s language skills develop from the reciprocal transactions between individ-ual competencies and the cultural contexts in which a child is situated or operates (Bronfenbrenner,1979; Gauvain, 2001; Hoff, 2006; Ogbu, 1981; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978). Social interactions providethe bridge between a child’s burgeoning language skills and the larger set of behaviors and beliefs thatcomprise the cultural milieu of that child’s everyday experiences (Chen & French, 2008).

We first describe the presence of screen media in the lives of infants and toddlers. Next, we present abrief discussion of ecological models as they relate to infants’ and toddlers’ media use and languagedevelopment. This model is followed by a general overview of early language development with a special

1 Visual-only media stimuli include books, pictures, flashcards, and other print sources. Verbal-only media stimuli includeradios, CD players, and mp3 players like iPods. Visual and verbal combined media stimuli include on-air and previously-recordedtelevision content (e.g., DVDs, VHS tapes, Comcast DVR devices, TiVo), computers, and other, more hand-held devices such as iPodsor iPhones with small screens, Sony PSP, or Nintendo DS or DSi.

178 D.L. Linebarger, S.E. Vaala / Developmental Review 30 (2010) 176–202

emphasis on those language skills that individually co-vary as a function of the amount and quality oflinguistic input. Next, we describe the methods used to study language development and screen mediause with infants and toddlers. That section is followed by a discussion of the extant research organizedaround the three interrelated factors thought to influence learning from screen media. Throughout, weidentify gaps in the literature as well as offer suggestions for future research. We then conclude with ourassessment of the nature of the relations among language and screen media as well as our recommen-dations regarding whether or not infants and toddlers should be exposed to screen media content.

Screen media in the lives of infants and toddlers

In recent years, infant- and toddler-directed DVDs/videos have become commonplace in the lives ofyoung children. The average American 6-month-old infant has at least four DVDs/videos, including suchtitles as Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby and Baby Genius (Barr, Lally, Hilliard, Andolina, & Ruskis, 2009). By18 months of age, the number of DVDs/videos jumps to over seven. Recent surveys indicate that the typ-ical child under three spends between 80 (i.e., 0 to 1 year olds) and 127 min (i.e., 2 to 3 year olds) of anaverage day watching screen media that parents have turned on specifically for them as well as 44–52 min looking at books (Rideout & Hamel, 2006). Part of the reason for this level of screen media expo-sure is likely due to parents’ beliefs that this type of content can be educational and beneficial to theiryoung child’s brain development (Zimmerman, Christakis, & Meltzoff, 2007a). Although many parentsmay be using screen media content in an effort to give their child a jump-start on ABCs and 123s (Gar-rison & Christakis, 2005; Zimmerman et al., 2007a), the actual impact of this exposure on babies is notyet clear.

Due to this uncertainty, several institutions including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) have argued against the use of screenmedia with infants and toddlers. In 1999, the AAP released a policy statement that discouraged par-ents’ use of screen media with their children prior to age two and limited exposure thereafter (AAP,1999; 2001). Their position was based on concerns that television viewing specifically would displaceother constructive and more developmentally beneficial activities for infants and toddlers includingparent–child interactions (AAP, 2001). The AAP’s policy is an especially conservative counter-positionto the beneficial claims made by media producers (e.g., ‘‘delights children by exposing them to earlydeveloping sounds and words that lay the groundwork for future communication. . .”; Baby BabbleDVD).

As there is insufficient high-quality empirical research indicating that all screen media exposure isharmful for babies and toddlers, the recommendation likely stems from a need to protect a populationof children who, because of their developmental status, are deemed especially vulnerable (Potter,2010). In addition to the perceived vulnerability of infants and toddlers, parents are equally vulnerableto the numerous educational claims made not only by screen media producers but also by makers oftoys, books, activities, materials, and other items. Parental concerns are further heightened by thebrevity of this developmental period, the prevailing view that birth to 3 years is a critical period ofchild development, and the resultant parental need to provide all the right opportunities to theirchildren.

A good deal of the current emphasis on early childhood stemmed from the convergence of threefactors in the 1990s: brain-related academic research; recommendations put forth by the CarnegieTask Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children (1994); and the 1997 White House Summit onEarly Childhood Development and Learning (Puckett, Marshall, & Davis, 1999). There was a generalsense that parents should do ‘‘everything in their power to secure the knowledge and resources theyneed to plan and raise children responsibly” (p. 112; Carnegie Task Force, 1994). The recommenda-tions were initially targeted toward securing more research funding for early childhood; however,makers of infant and toddler products successfully used these recommendations to create an industryaround parents’ ‘‘sense of urgency, even panic, over what young children needed, when they needed it,and what could happen if they didn’t get it” (p. 195; Zigler, Finn-Stevenson, & Hall, 2002).

Screen-media-wise, a significant percentage of parents have reported that educational media are‘‘very important” to their children’s intellectual development. Fifty-eight percent of parents believed


that educational television was very important; 49% believed that educational videos were veryimportant; and 43% reported that educational computers games were very important (Rideout,Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003). Nine percent of parents also reported that educational TV and educa-tional videos were most important to their child’s intellectual development (i.e., compared with 66%who selected books). In addition to its importance, more parents (i.e., 43%) also believed that elec-tronic media ‘‘mostly helped” their children learn while 27% reported that it mostly hurt learningand 21% reported that it did not affect learning positively or negatively (Rideout et al., 2003).

To begin to understand whether and how screen media influence infants’ and toddlers’ languagedevelopment, it is important to understand that not all screen media are the same. In fact, screen med-ia content is quite diverse ranging from content created for infants and marketed to parents (i.e., in-fant-directed screen media); to content created and marketed toward preschool or older children (i.e.,child-directed screen media); and content created and marketed toward adults (i.e., adult-directedscreen media). Most infant-directed screen media (e.g., Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart, Brainy Baby, Baby-FirstTV) are characterized by frequent scene, character, or object changes, with many perceptually-(e.g., sound effects, background music; voice-overs) and visually-salient features (e.g., colors; babies;pictures of objects or animals), and relatively simple or familiar backdrops or sets (e.g., white back-ground; simulated family room; Goodrich, Pempek, & Calvert, 2009). Content features objects orevents that are thematically- or categorically-related (e.g., household items; instruments; animals)with little or no narrative.

Child-directed screen media content is any other child-directed content not specifically created foror targeted toward children two and under. Similar to infant-directed content, child-directed content isalso quite variable in format and content. Formats include narratives (e.g., Sid the Science Kid, DinosaurTrain, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Arthur and Friends), expositories (e.g., Zoboomafoo, Zoom, Bill Nye the Sci-ence Guy) and narrative/expository hybrids (e.g., Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, Barney and Friends).

Adult-directed screen media refers to content created for and targeted toward adults. For the pur-poses of this review, all adult-directed content has been categorized together. As with infant-, andchild-directed content, the types of adult-directed content are highly variable.

In addition to these three commercially-produced categories, there is a fourth category of screenmedia content created by researchers who are experimentally investigating whether and how infantsand toddlers learn language more generally or learn language from screen media specifically. This con-tent is typically of low production quality and singularly focused on a specific infant behavior like imi-tation, object retrieval, emotion understanding, or word learning.

Similar to educationally-labeled child-directed content, the packaging and websites associatedwith infant-directed screen media often include claims of educational or developmental benefit.The major difference between infant- and child-directed claims is that the majority of child-directedclaims have been empirically justified (e.g., Anderson et al., 2000; Crawley, Anderson, Wilder, Wil-liams, & Santomero, 1999; Linebarger, Kosanic, Greenwood, & Doku, 2004; Linebarger, Piotrowski, &Greenwood, 2010; Uchikoshi, 2005, 2006) while most infant-directed claims have yet to be evaluated.A recent content analysis of infant-directed screen media indicated that products making explicit lan-guage-related claims did contain a higher percentage of scenes featuring language content. Duringthese scenes, language-promoting strategies were used more frequently (e.g., verbal labeling; ques-tions; Vaala et al., 2009). Still, the utility of these strategies when used in screen media content hasnot been determined. For children 2 years and over, effects are driven by media content (e.g., Andersonet al., 2001; Wright et al., 2001). For babies, it is unknown whether and under what circumstancescontent-based models apply. With 61% of babies under two and 88% of 2-year-olds using screen mediaon any given day (Rideout & Hamel, 2006), it is vital to understand what the potential impacts ofscreen media use on early language development might be.

Examining media and language development through an ecological framework

An ecological approach proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1944, 1979) asserts that a child’s individualdevelopment cannot be separated from the immediate social networks in which the child is ensconcedor the larger historical and social factors that impinge on this development (Cairns & Cairns, 2005).


Bronfenbrenner (1944) argued that ‘‘piecemeal analysis, fixed in time and space, of isolated aspects isinsufficient and even misleading, for the elements of social status and structure are interdependent,organized into complex patterns, and subject both to random and lawful variation” (p. 75). The utilityof an ecological approach to media effects was explored by Jordan (2004, 2005) who shifted the focusof media effects research toward models that simultaneously considered contextual, individual, andsocietal forces that shape and are shaped by media. Rather than statistically controlling out theseforces, researchers need to examine how they co-vary with both predictor and outcome to explain ob-served relations.

Overview of language development

Language development results from a combination of factors arising from both biological and envi-ronmental sources. An ecological explanation of language development includes, as the major mech-anisms of change, the quantity and quality of both verbal and nonverbal social interactions (Gauvain,2001; Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2006; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978). Even before infants producetheir first recognizable word, they have acquired knowledge of a number of words and can use prelin-guistic skills to communicate intentionally with another person. As part of this intentionality, infantsobserve and participate in a variety of social exchanges as they learn about the functions and forms oflanguage. Social interactions represent the major source of linguistic assistance needed to ensure thatinfants who are both biologically equipped and socially motivated to learn language do so (Bruner,1977, 1983). Infants whose language partners (usually parents or close caregivers) provide sensitiveand contingent social responses that afford infants with appropriate contextualization of the social ex-change support infants’ increasingly sophisticated ways of communicating as well as their overall lan-guage development (Garton, 1992; Garton & Pratt, 1998; Landry, Smith, & Swank, 2006).

While the home environment plays a crucial role in early language development, evidence suggeststhat, with minimal linguistic exposure, many children hit language milestones around the same timeand most children learn to talk (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). For example, young babies can discrimi-nate among the full range of phonemes across the world’s languages. Between 6- and 12-months, thisability is lost as babies hone in on their culture’s native language (Kuhl et al., 2006; Shonkoff & Phillips,2000; Werker & Tees, 2004). Across cultures and languages, children speak their first word between10- and 15-months. Soon after, they learn that words are comprised of ‘‘parts,” allowing them tomanipulate single words (e.g., ‘‘cookie” becomes ‘‘cookie-s”) and eventually combine single words intolonger phrases and sentences (e.g., ‘‘my cookies”). Around 18- to 22-months, the average child expe-riences a ‘‘word-learning explosion,” adding an average of nine new words to the language repertoiredaily (Carey, 1978; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 127). By age three, vocabulary acquisition acceleratesas most preschoolers have begun to master the rules of language use (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000).

The robust nature of language development masks a substantial degree of variability in higher-or-der language skills. This variability, in turn, is responsible for substantial and lasting differences thatpervade most developmental domains, persist over time, and predict both school and later life success(Hart & Risley, 1995; NICHD Early Childcare Research Network, 2004; Stanovich, 1986; Walker et al.,1994). Hart and Risley (1995) documented that infants and toddlers heard anywhere between 56 and793 utterances directed toward them in a given hour. The quantity and nature of words heard in thehome is fairly stable over time and predicts vocabulary size at age three (Hart & Risley, 1995).

Language development does not occur in isolation. Instead, social interactions with others providea framework through which young children learn the forms and features of language (Gauvain, 2001;Hoff, 2006). Interactions, even with preverbal infants and toddlers, provide detailed knowledge aboutobjects, events, and persons as both actual referents and representations of these referents. Becausesocial interactions are vital to language acquisition, it is important to determine whether screen mediacreate a sufficient approximation of a physically-present language partner and, if so, how it functionsas a limited social partner.

Young children spend considerable time with screen media. It is reasonable to expect that onscreenlinguistic input could support language development in ways similar to other linguistic sources. Con-versely, more time spent with media that does a poor job supporting language could, as argued by the


AAP and others, crowd out time with better language models (e.g., parents; caregivers), leading to def-icits in vocabulary, expressive language and other skills.

Methodologies used to study relations among screen media use and language development

Experimental and correlational frameworks have been used to investigate screen media use andlanguage development was infants and toddlers. To better understand how screen media impact lan-guage development, it is critical that researchers use a variety of methodologies. Experimental manip-ulations, both short-term and longitudinal studies, establish causality. Correlational studies establishrelations between variables and suggest patterns for further investigation. These studies include cross-sectional surveys and longitudinal descriptive studies. Multiple approaches linked to multiple out-comes contribute to an overall picture of how, under what circumstances, and for which childrenscreen media use matters.

Experimental methodologies

Experimental studies fall under two primary areas: those that use television screens to test generallanguage acquisition hypotheses and those that examine specific types of learning from single or mul-tiple exposures to particular researcher-created screen media stimuli. Much of the general languageacquisition literature uses some type of screen media stimuli to determine what and how infants learnlanguage. In these studies, the focus is not on the screen media device or whether learning occurs as aresult of seeing a particular stimulus onscreen. Instead, a TV screen is used as an apparatus to deliverthe experimental stimuli (e.g., split-screen preferential looking-paradigm; Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek,Cauley, & Gordon, 1987; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996). Many of these studies examine infants’ abilityto draw simple associations between words and objects or words and actions including nouns, verbs,prepositions, syntactic structures, and an ability to generalize words to novel exemplars (Hennonet al., 1999; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996; McDonough, Choi, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1998; Naigles,1998).

Experimental studies specifically testing learning from screen media have used a variety of differ-ent experimental manipulations paradigms to evaluate language learning. Learning is tested by com-paring screen media exposed infants to unexposed infants, by comparing infants who hear and seecontent delivered by a physically-present adult compared with infants who hear and see contentdelivered by a televised adult. Outcomes tested by these manipulations include learning of real wordsor phonemes (e.g., Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003; Robb, Richert, & Wartella, 2009), connecting objects or ac-tions with a novel word (e.g., Roseberry, Hirsh-Pasek, Parish-Morris, & Golinkoff, 2009; Scofield & Wil-liams, 2009; Scofield, Williams, & Behrend, 2007; Yuan & Fisher, 2009), or following visual and verbalattention-directing behaviors (Briganti & Cohen, 2007). The majority of evidence from these experi-ments suggests what Anderson and Pempek (2005) have coined the ‘‘video deficit;” that is, infantsand toddlers do not seem to learn the same information as readily from screen media as from livesituations.

Correlational methodologies

In correlational studies, the associations between children’s time spent viewing television (i.e., allcontent; program content categories; or specific programs) and language-related outcomes have beenexamined cross-sectionally (Zimmerman & Christakis, 2005; Zimmerman, Christakis, & Meltzoff,2007b) and longitudinally (e.g., Linebarger & Walker, 2005; Schmidt, Rich, Rifas-Shiman, Oken, & Tav-eras, 2009). This research parallels research with children two and over. Associations among screenmedia exposure and language outcomes for infants and toddlers vary by the structure and contentof programming in the child’s overall media diet as well as with the particular language skill measured(Anderson et al., 2001; Linebarger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger & Walker, 2005; Wright et al., 2001; Zim-merman et al., 2007b).


Methodological convergence

As a literature base evolves, scientists attempt to establish convergence across a variety of meth-odologies as a mechanism to establish the presence or absence of a phenomenon. As part of this pro-cess, they will examine the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs and the parameters underwhich the phenomenon is modified. For example, there is considerable evidence across multiplemethodologies that the language skills of children two and older can be augmented or inhibited byscreen media exposure (e.g., Anderson et al., 2001; Linebarger et al., 2004; Wright et al., 2001). Atpresent, there is no similar preponderance of evidence that indicates screen media are universallybad or good for infants and toddlers. Instead, existing evidence suggests that any effects will resultfrom an interplay among the parameters identified above: child attributes, stimulus characteristics,and environmental contexts of use.

A second challenge facing researchers who study young children involves managing the tensionamong our own views and the need to remain impartial and follow where the research leads (e.g.,Punch, 2002). Children are generally perceived as vulnerable and in need of protection due to theirlimited intellectual and emotional capacities. Infants and toddlers are especially vulnerable (see Cour-age & Setliff, 2009). Indeed, widespread anxiety about protecting such a vulnerable population makesus more likely to err on the side of caution until more questions in a particular domain have been an-swered. This tension is evident across a number of areas including the methodologies selected to studyan issue, the measures used to capture child outcomes, the justification for a particular study, theframing of the research questions, the focus of the discussion, the willingness to explore multiple fac-ets of a data set, and even the publicity associated with particular findings that fails to incorporateappropriate cautions.

The current debate about screen media use by infants and toddlers has many examples of one ormore of these biases. For instance, scholars with clinical or public health training tend to argue thatany screen media use is inappropriate and potentially harmful for infants and toddlers (e.g., AAP,1999). Initial research derived from this perspective most often uses aggregate measures of time spentwith media to predict language outcomes with controls for a variety of socio-demographic or parent–child interactional characteristics that could potentially mediate or moderate observed relations (e.g.,Christakis, 2009; Christakis, Zimmerman, DiGuseppe, & McCarty, 2004; Zimmerman & Christakis,2005).

These studies have provided initial information about potential relations among screen media useand a variety of outcomes. Perhaps more importantly, these studies spurred a healthy debate aboutscreen media exposure and child development in the scientific community, the general public, andwith persons whose positions and influence can manipulate public policies. Scholars were quick todismiss some of these studies on the grounds that they were scientifically flawed (see Chernin & Line-barger, 2005, for a review). Unfortunately, the fallout from the publicity was significant, placing an un-due burden of guilt on parents and caregivers who were struggling to make choices about the use ofscreen media. On the public policy side of this debate, the French government opted to ban programstargeted directly to children under age three. France’s Minister of Culture and Communication Chris-tine Albanel issued a ‘‘cry of alarm” about children under three watching baby-targeted programs. Theruling cites health experts who argue that interaction with others is crucial to early childdevelopment:

‘‘Television viewing hurts the development of children under 3 years old and poses a certain numberof risks encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, troubles with sleep andconcentrations as well as dependence on screens” (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel, 2008, p. 2).

To date, the documented relations are less than straightforward and dependent upon a multitudeof factors across the child, the family, and the media.

Reanalysis of data using aggregate media estimates and simple statistical models has yielded sub-stantially different results when using more complex models and additional covariates. In a recentreanalysis of the data used by Christakis et al. (2004), Foster and Watkins (2010) found that therelation between exposure and attention existed, at best, for only 10% of the children in that samplewho watched 7 or more hours per day of television. This non-linear relation was reduced to


non-significance with the addition of two covariates: mother’s achievement level and family income.This reanalysis is a key illustration of why future studies of screen media exposure and child outcomesmust begin to develop and test more sophisticated models that examine screen media use as one ofmany linguistic input sources generated by the everyday contexts in which children participate. Doingso would help to prevent inaccurate or incomplete representations of the existing research, addresssignificant gaps in the integration of effects across multiple levels of a child’s experience, and deter-mine whether, how, and under what circumstances screen media use impacts young children. To cul-tivate these contextually-based models, researchers should employ ecological frameworks tosimultaneously consider person, process, context, space, and time (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Cairns &Cairns, 2005; Moen, Elder, & Luscher, 2001).

Understanding what babies are viewing: a content analysis of infant and toddler videos

To shift the direct-effects early media exposure arguments toward more contextually-based mod-els, we have systematically content-analyzed infant- and child-directed educational content (i.e., edu-cational as defined by any educational claims associated with each property). Code developmentinvolved a review of research that described how and what conditional parameters supported earlylearning by infants and toddlers. Broadly, we developed three separate coding systems to quantifythese parameters: formal features (Goodrich et al., 2009); interactional quality (Fenstermacheret al., 2009); and language-promoting strategies (Vaala et al., 2009). To generate the sample, onlyscreen media that made some type of educational claim (e.g., ‘‘encourages infants and toddlers tolearn the written word naturally at the same time as they are learning the spoken word”; Your BabyCan Read) were eligible for inclusion.

Formal features are comprised of audio and visual production features was organize content andact as syntactical markers of time, place, or scene (Huston & Wright, 1983; Wright & Huston, 1983).Visual techniques include cuts, fades, dissolves, and special effects while aural techniques includesound effects, music, and speech. In addition to these specific production techniques, formal featuresare also comprised of the level of character action, the rate of change, and the pacing of content pre-sentation. We found that infant-directed media are rapidly paced (i.e., 3.1 scene changes, 5.2 char-acter changes, and 3.1 object changes per minute), contain frequent camera cuts (i.e., 4.9 per minute)and multiple visual special effects (i.e., 5.1 per minute), and infrequently use reflective features likelong camera zooms (i.e., 0.6 per minute). These features place a heavy cognitive burden on infants’limited processing skills. As a result, learning from this type of screen media is likely to be quitechallenging.

Interactional quality was measured by coding the frequency and quality of depicted interactionsbetween adult and child or child and child characters. Interactions were defined as each instancewhen onscreen characters were joined by one or more new characters or when one or more charactersleft a scene. The majority of onscreen characters did not interact with one another (i.e., 65% of theinteractions). Adult–child exchanges occurred during 11% of interactions and peer-to-peer exchangesoccurred during 25% of interactions (Fenstermacher et al., 2009). Given that about 1/3rd of the infant-directed sample made an educational claim related to parent–child interactions or socio-emotionaldevelopment (Fenstermacher et al., 2009), these results were surprising. There was also no relationbetween these interactional claims and an increased frequency of onscreen high-quality interactions.It is possible that these interactional claims are related to the live interactions that would be generatedbetween infants and caregivers as a result of viewing this media (Pempek, Demers, Anderson, & Kirko-rian, 2007).

The third coding scheme included learning and language-promoting strategies (Vaala et al., 2009).Scenes were initially tagged for the dominant educational domain (e.g., language, general knowledge,cognitive, social/emotional, physical/motor, other/unclear). Next, each scene that was assigned aneducational domain content code was coded for specific language-promoting strategies. Strategies in-cluded labeling (of object/action), onscreen print (with visual/verbal referent), use of questions, for-eign and sign language, verbalized vocabulary definitions, audience elicitation, establishing jointattention, and verbal rhyming. The average video contained 23% of scenes with language domain


content. Across these scenes, 62% included at least one language-promoting strategy. Most of thesestrategies consisted of lower-order language support like labeling of actions and objects (i.e., 97% ofvideos and 42% of scenes) and establishing joint attention (i.e., 93% of videos and 21% of scenes).The use of more complex language processing and production strategies occurred much less fre-quently. Questions, audience elicitations, vocabulary definitions, and rhyming were found in fewerthan 10% of scenes (i.e., questions: 55% of videos, 9% of scenes; audience elicitations: 59% of videosand 7% of scenes; definitions: 43% of videos; 2% of scenes; rhyming: 28% of videos and 3% of scenes).Finally, videos targeted at infants 6 months and younger made fewer language-related claims and con-tained significantly fewer language-promoting strategies than those targeted to infants over 6 monthsof age (Vaala et al., 2009, 2010).

The picture of infant-directed screen media content that emerged from these three content analy-ses is one in which content creators appeared to lack knowledge about how infants and toddlers learn.Most programs contained high concentrations of formal features. To illustrate, Blue’s Clues averages 3cuts per 30-min episode while infant-directed screen media averaged 6 cuts per minute (Goodrichet al., 2009). A majority of scenes containing two or more characters lacked basic adult–child andchild–child interactions. Embedded language support was mostly simple labeling while higher-orderlanguage processing support was rarely used. Language skills develop from the type and quality of lin-guistic input used during social exchanges (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2006). As such, infant-directedscreen media in its current form is poorly designed, insufficient to support language processing, anddevelopmentally inappropriate. Researchers need to evaluate the efficacy of the characteristics iden-tified above in order to determine whether and how these structural features impact languageacquisition.

Factors influencing young children’s language learning from screen media

There is nothing inherently more problematic with screen media when compared to other mediaforms (e.g., pictures, books, art; Golomb, 2007). Scholars investigating language learning from othermedia forms have documented how child attributes, stimulus characteristics, language skills of inter-est, and the environmental contexts surrounding media use. There is much less research available foreach of these factors as they relate to learning from screen media.

First, infants and toddlers bring a limited set of experiences and little background knowledge of thecontent and format used to deliver that content. These immature competencies put them at a disad-vantage in learning language from screen media. Second, certain constellations of screen media fea-tures create situations that, under live language learning circumstances, have supported orinhibited language learning. These situations include dialogue between characters, the use of explicitlanguage prompting routines, and the presentation format used to convey content (i.e., narrative,expository, hybrid). Third, the language skills to be evaluated must co-vary as a function of the amountand type of linguistic input. Effects are more likely to be detected when this is the case. Fourth, theenvironmental context surrounding screen media use can facilitate or inhibit language learning. Fre-quent and high-quality adult–child interactions facilitate language acquisition while fewer and lower-quality talk (i.e., prohibitions, negative affect directives) inhibits language development (Hart & Risley,1995; Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). Each of these factors, child attributes, lan-guage skill of interest, stimulus characteristics, and environmental contexts, are reviewed below.

Child attributes influencing language learning from screen media

As a whole, the literature regarding young children’s language learning from screen media indi-cates that, as infants age, their ability to comprehend and retain screen media content increases.Children who are 18 months and older evidence the greatest language benefits from media sources,though a few studies have demonstrated language learning among younger infants (e.g., Krcmar,Grela, & Lin, 2007; Smith & Yu, 2008; Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998). To processcontent from screen presentations, children must possess an understanding of dual representation.This skill is the knowledge that pictures are not only objects in-and-of-themselves, but also


representations of some other person or object in the real world (Pierroutsakos & Troseth, 2003).Though some research indicates that this skill may start to emerge near 15- to 19-months (Pierr-outsakos & Troseth, 2003), it is not fully developed until after a child’s 2nd birthday (DeLoache,1991). Vocabulary learning from screen media may be particularly dependent on knowledge of dualrepresentation as this skill requires infants to simultaneously represent an object as both its ownentity and a symbol for something else. Once children grasp that an image on the screen representsa broader referent-category in the real world they should be better able to learn vocabulary and ex-tend this knowledge to other settings.

As infants’ and toddlers’ experiences and competencies grow, their vocabulary and conceptualknowledge deepens. A more developed knowledge base makes it easier to process content and, asa result, learn words from screen media. Krcmar and colleagues (2007) found that superior wordlearning from televised presentations (i.e., via a speaker and an edited Teletubbies clip) occurredmore frequently among same-age infants who had larger existing vocabularies. Werker, Fennel,Corcoran, and Stager (2002) also found that younger infants (i.e., 14-months) with larger vocabular-ies were better able to learn phonetically similar novel words than their same-age peers with smal-ler vocabularies. Once the ability to learn words is established (i.e., for 17- and 20-month-olds),vocabulary size no longer discriminates infants’ word-learning rates. Thus, the role of existingvocabulary knowledge may vary by the language skill in question, and in some cases, may serveas a proxy for other fundamental cognitive developments (e.g., understanding of dualrepresentation).

Infants faced with dynamic stimuli often lack sufficient cognitive capacity to make sense of thesestimuli (Lang, 2000; Valkenburg & Vroone, 2004). As a result features that are more perceptuallysalient (e.g., loud noises; visual effects; movement) automatically elicit attention. Attending to lessperceptually salient content requires ‘‘controlled processing”; that is, deliberate attention towardscentral content (e.g., to the storyline or educational lesson) that may be less visually or aurally sali-ent and away from more perceptually-prominent but less informative incidental content. Attentionpatterns for children between 6- and 18-months supported this hypothesis (Valkenburg & Vroone,2004). Infants and toddlers attended most to scenes with salient aural (e.g., applause; laughter; mu-sic; odd sounds) and visual features (e.g., bright colors; rapid movement; unexpected visual effects)while toddlers between 19- and 35-months looked longer at scenes with fewer salient features. Incontrast, preschoolers (i.e., P36 months) attended to scenes with fewer salient features and morecentral content (e.g., informative dialogue, attention-directing speech; Valkenburg & Vroone,2004). These attention patterns suggest that learning from screen media is dependent on how clo-sely the visual and aural features were synched to key educational content. A greater degree of mis-match results in minimal learning at best (Anderson & Pempek, 2005; Ruff & Rothbart, 1996;Valkenburg & Vroone, 2004).

The conundrum then becomes that, in order for very young children to be able to attend to, process,encode, retrieve, and learn from televised content, they need to accumulate a certain amount of expe-rience with the structural conventions of screen media more generally (i.e., formal features), the spe-cific program format delivering the content they are viewing (e.g., narrative, expository), and then theactual content. There is evidence that older children use the same set of cognitive skills to comprehendtelevised messages as they use to comprehend printed messages (Kendeou et al., 2005), and thatscreen media exposure can help preschoolers develop their print-related narrative comprehensionand production skills (Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009). At present, researchers have not specificallyinvestigated whether infants use similar processing skills across screen media and other media forms;however, DeLoache and colleagues’ research with pictures and picture books provides the closestapproximation. As described, infants’ ability to learn from screen media evolves from their abilityto understand dual representation. Two-dimensional representations of objects and events, whetherdepicted in a picture, a picture book, or onscreen, are referents of their actual three-dimensional selves(DeLoache, 1991; DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, & Troseth, 1996; Ganea, Pickard, & DeLoache, 2008; Pierr-outsakos & Troseth, 2003). The likelihood of transferring processing skills across media forms in-creases as the iconicity or resemblance between the representation and its referent increases(Simcock & DeLoache, 2006). More research with infants and toddlers that examines individual differ-ences in combination with a skill’s developmental function is urgently needed.


Role of language skill characteristics in language learning from screen media

In addition to child attributes, the available research also indicates that detecting effects dependson the particular language skill measured. Research has established that certain higher-order languageskills are more susceptible to environmental influence. These skills include phonetic contrast sensitiv-ities, vocabulary size, language production (i.e., propensity to communicate with others), morpholog-ical discriminations (e.g., subtle shift from the present ‘‘I eat” to continuously ‘‘eating” over time), andevent memory (e.g., children who receive less linguistic input talk less often about the nonpresentthat, in turn, affects how well they remember past events).

Kuhl and colleagues tested infants’ ability to retain sensitivity to phonetic contrasts in a non-nativelanguage (Kuhl et al., 2003). Under 6 months of age, infants are able to discriminate among the pho-netic units of all languages. The ability to discern all contrasts is gradually lost between 6- and 12-months of age as infants are socialized into their native language. Nine-month-old American infantswere exposed to live, televised, or audio recordings of Mandarin speakers. Only infants in the liveexposure condition were able to maintain sensitivity to the phonetic units unique to Mandarin despiteconsiderable exposure in all conditions (i.e., 5 h of exposure over twelve sessions). While phoneticcontrasts were not supported by televised or aurally-recorded input, other research has found that ba-bies as young as 4 months can identify the correct televised speaker by matching a particular spokenphoneme to the lip movements of the speaker (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982).

In a second paradigm, language researchers use video presentations to teach novel words (e.g.,‘‘blicking”) and to determine whether infants and toddlers have learned novel words. In these studies,longer looks to the accurate video presentation are thought to represent their capacity to learn novelwords and to discriminate definitions for those novel words (Bird & Chapman, 1998; Carey & Bartlett,1978; Scofield & Williams, 2009; Scofield et al., 2007; Smith & Yu, 2008; Werker et al., 1998, 2002).Werker and colleagues (2002) demonstrated that 17- and 20-month-old babies (but not 14-month-olds) could learn and discriminate between two phonetically similar novel words (e.g., ‘‘bih”; ‘‘dih”)following minimal video exposure. Twelve- to 14-month-old infants were able to use accumulatedcues across exposures to pictures with audio pairings to infer multiple word-referent associations(Smith & Yu, 2008). Fourteen-month-old infants learned novel referents but only when they werepaired with an object that was moving (Werker et al., 1998). These findings suggest that, given theright circumstances, children may be able to learn new words from media presentations before theirsecond birthday.

In another recent experimental study, Krcmar et al. (2007) used four different formats to present no-vel words to 15- to 24-month-old infants. Using a repeated measures design, words were presented toeach baby via (1) a live speaker engaged in joint-reference to the object, (2) a live speaker with discrepantreference, (3) a televised speaker, and (4) a commercially produced infant-directed program (Teletubbies)with an edited voice-over. Overall, participants were better able to identify the referents they hadlearned in the live joint-reference condition and were least successful identifying words from the Tele-tubbies segment. Children across the age-range were able to learn the words from the televised speaker.Only the older infants (22- to 24-month-olds) were able to demonstrate limited word learning from theTeletubbies segment.

Syntactic bootstrapping among young children is defined as the ability to infer meaning of novelwords and phrases using contextual cues found in syntax. Recently, Yuan and Fisher (2009) introduced24-month-old children to video-taped two-participant dialogues containing intransitive (e.g., ‘‘Janeblicked the baby”) or transitive statements (e.g., ‘‘Jane blicked”). Afterwards, the children were shownvideo-taped one- and two-participant actions side-by-side while a voiceover asked which video con-tained the target action (e.g., ‘‘Find blicking! Where’s blicking?”). Toddlers who heard the intransitivestatements looked longer at the two-participant video than those who heard the transitive dialogue.In similar paradigms, 21- to 25-month-old infants looked longer at videos correctly matching the agentand object positions they heard in the dialogue (e.g., ‘‘the duck is gorping the bunny”; Gertner, Fisher, &Eisengart, 2006). In each case the toddlers successfully inferred information about the meaning of thenovel action from the video-taped speakers’ syntax. In addition to these experimental studies, correla-tional evidence suggests that general vocabulary size is predicted by exposure to individual programs


and by exposure to different categories of screen media content (Linebarger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger &Walker, 2005; Zimmerman et al., 2007b).

Screen media’s influence on morphological skills and event memory skills for children under twohas not been examined. Because morphology contributes to the formation of nuanced understandingsof word meanings, it is likely that effects similar to those found for vocabulary learning would befound. The ability to remember past events is linked to narrative comprehension and production skills.There is experimental evidence that repeated exposure to narrative programs (i.e., Clifford the Big RedDog, Pinky Dinky Doo) supports preschoolers’ ability to generate and subsequently retell a story (Line-barger & Piotrowski, 2009). Correlational evidence indicates that 30-month-olds’ vocabulary size andlanguage production skills were positively predicted by cumulative exposure (beginning at 6-months)to narrative programs (Linebarger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger & Walker, 2005). Vocabulary size and lan-guage production skills have been implicated in older children’s narrative skills. Narrative skills, inturn, are associated with the frequency of talk about the non-present and the ability to recall eventsmore broadly (Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). The developmental chain ofskills leading from word learning to event memory should be examined in relation to screen mediause. Word learning for children under two and narrative skills for children over two are clearly sup-ported by screen media. Longitudinal research needs to examine whether screen media support thedevelopment of these skills independent of each other or whether screen media augment or inhibitthese skills across the developmental chain.

Stimulus characteristics influencing language learning from screen media

Effects attributable to screen media may also arise from characteristics of the structure or contentof the stimuli. With children who are two and older, there are a number of stimulus characteristicsthat have been empirically linked to language acquisition from television (Rice, 1983). These featuresinclude the use of predictable program formats, recasts, simple sentences, slow rates of speech, exactand paraphrased content repetitions, long pauses, pairing of familiar routines with novel vocabularyor concepts, and visual/verbal redundancy (Rice, 1983; Rice & Haight, 1986). These molecular-levelfeatures are characteristic of broader language learning situations in everyday life. We propose thatwhen screen media content is presented in ways that closely parallel these situations, language learn-ing is more likely to occur. These situations include listening in or overhearing language exchangesbetween two or more persons, receiving explicit prompts or requests to use language, and deliveringlanguage exchanges with expected social cues and conventions.

Screen media use, in general

Because language learning from screen media content is likely linked to the similarities betweenthis content and live language learning situations, using aggregate estimates of time spent viewingscreen media will miss critical relations between content and language development. Total time spentviewing has historically been a poorer predictor of child outcomes when compared to time spentviewing different categories of content and even individual programs (e.g., Anderson et al., 2001; Line-barger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger & Walker, 2005; Wright et al., 2001). In recent years, a number ofstudies have used total screen media exposure to predict general cognitive or attentional outcomes(Christakis et al., 2004; Ruangdaraganon et al., 2009; Schmidt et al., 2009; Zimmerman & Christakis,2005). After controlling for a variety of socio-demographic variables related to both television useand child outcomes (e.g., maternal education, parity, marital status, income, breastfeeding duration),both Ruangdaraganon et al. (2009) and Schmidt et al. (2009) found no relation between total viewingand cognitive and language outcomes. Zimmerman and Christakis (2005) found that amount of view-ing before age 3 was associated with slight to modest deficits in reading recognition, reading compre-hension and digit span scores at age 6 and with lower math ability among children below the medianincome level. Christakis et al. (2004) found a small negative relation between viewing and attentionproblems although a reanalysis of this data indicated no effect (Foster & Watkins, 2010). In a fol-low-up to this study, Zimmerman and Christakis (2007) classified content into three broad categories:


educational, non-violent entertainment, and violent and found that non-violent entertainment andviolent content predicted attention problems while educational content did not. This set of analysesonce again underscores the critical need to examine how different types of content paired with vari-able structural features cause or predict different outcomes.

In fact, analyses that use broad categories may also miss important differences associated with par-ticular structural features and content. In earlier research examining total time, broad content catego-ries, and individual program titles, the strongest predictors of language outcomes were associatedwith individual program titles (Linebarger & Walker, 2005). Interestingly, total time spent viewingany television content positively predicted the growth rate and acceleration in expressive languageuse as well as the 30-month intercept and growth rate for vocabulary size. The hypothesized relationsamong broader content categories (i.e., educational, entertainment, violent, adult-directed) and out-comes did not occur. In fact, only two of the 15 relations included in these two growth models weresignificant. Specifically, viewing adult-directed programming positively predicted the growth rate ofexpressive language use while child-informational content negatively predicted vocabulary size (Line-barger & Walker, 2005).

Puzzling over these findings led us to reconsider what kinds of content were educational for infantsand toddlers and whether the structural features used to present this content might play a moreimportant role in the success or failure of infants’ learning from content in comparison to children2 years and older. We hypothesized that certain features in combination with content would supportscreen media learning (e.g., narrative formats, simple stories, explicit prompting routines), while otherfeatures would inhibit learning (e.g., expository formats, loosely themed content, little if any story,unsophisticated language models; Linebarger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger & Walker, 2005). As the re-search base grows in this area, our assertion that program features and content interact to supportor inhibit learning offers a more robust and consistent explanation for the findings.

Learning through overhearing or listening in

Recently, researchers have investigated why and how infants in cultures with little direct interac-tion with adults acquire language. In these cultures, infants spend most of their time in the companyof adults who interact with each other but not directly with the infants. It was proposed that infantslearn language in these cultures by observing social exchanges and overhearing adults communicatingwith each other. Evidence backing the efficacy of overhearing in language learning exists across threedifferent but complementary strands of research: (1) experimental studies comparing word learningthrough direct engagement with word learning by overhearing two adults speaking; (2) observationsof infants with older siblings; and (3) cross-cultural research documenting that infants in cultureswhere direct engagement with adults is rare do acquire language.

Experimentally, infants between 18-months and 30-months have learned object labels equally wellthrough direct address and overhearing while 18-month-old infants experience some difficulty learn-ing action verbs through overhearing (Akhtar, 2005; Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001; Floor & Akhtar,2006). Observationally, later-born infants correctly use personal pronouns earlier when compared tofirst-born or only infants and toddlers. Researchers argued that later-born infants’ exposure to per-sonal pronouns (e.g., you, I, me, mine) that were not directed exclusively to them helped them under-stand the nature of referential intent (Akhtar, 2004) sooner than their first-born or only counterparts(Akhtar, 2004). Hearing parents refer to their older sibling as ‘‘you” and hearing older siblings use ‘‘I”,‘‘me”, or ‘‘mine” contributed to later-born infants’ knowledge that personal pronouns are words usedto reference the addressee and not a unique identifier only for them (Oshima-Takane, 1988; Oshima-Takane, Goodz, & Derevensky, 1996). A similar phenomenon occurs when babies are learning to wave‘‘bye-bye”. Initially, many babies wave good-bye by opening and closing their hands with the fingersfacing their own faces rather than the person to whom the baby is waving. With time and experience,babies learn that waving bye-bye means opening and closing the hand with their fingers facing theperson they are waving to.

The third source of support for the efficacy of overhearing is derived from cross-cultural compar-isons of language practices. In a number of cultures, adults rarely or never address their infants di-rectly. Instead, these infants are socialized into their respective cultures as observers of adult


activities and adult-with-adult language exchanges (Crago, Allen, & Hough-Eyamie, 1997; Harkness,1991; Ochs, 1988, 1997; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Each of these three situations suggests that infantsare primed to learn language (i.e., privileged domain) and that they are able to adapt to and learn fromthe specific characteristics of their language learning environments.

Using researcher-developed stimuli, O’Doherty et al. (in press) experimentally tested whether 30-month-old toddlers could learn language by overhearing two adults speaking to each other onscreen.Toddlers were assigned to one of four conditions: live addressed toward the toddler; televised ad-dressed toward the toddler; live overheard two confederates speaking; televised overheard two con-federates speaking. The results indicated that the primary determinant of learning was not themedium. Instead, the nature of the social cues provided by either the live or the televised agent influ-enced word learning. Toddlers were equally adept at learning from overhearing in both the live andthe televised conditions while toddlers in the live and televised addressed conditions did not learnat levels above chance, a finding contrary to Akhtar’s research (e.g., Akhtar et al., 2001; Floor & Akhtar,2006).

O’Doherty et al. (in press) hypothesized that the key difference between her research and Akhtar’sfindings was an absence, at the conclusion of the addressed interaction, of an expected social cue orconvention (i.e., handing the target object to the toddler to manipulate). To test this hypothesis, a fifthcondition was added: live addressed with object handling. Toddlers were given the opportunity at theconclusion of the live addressed interaction to handle the object. With the additional social cue, tod-dlers’ word-learning rate in the revised live addressed condition was above chance making this studyconsistent with Akhtar’s studies (Akhtar et al., 2001; Floor & Akhtar, 2006).

Scofield and Williams (2009) found that toddlers who watched screen media with voice-overs reli-ably learned novel words from this media (i.e., on 92% of trials) and were able to extend these words tosimilar exemplars presented onscreen (i.e., 81% of trials). Although the toddlers in this study were ableto learn from screen media and generalize that learning, they performed at chance levels on a disam-biguation task presented onscreen. Disambiguation tasks are designed to assess whether toddlers,when presented with a familiar object and a novel object, attach novel words to novel objects. Chil-dren under 2 years (i.e., younger than the toddlers in this study) are able to disambiguate during liveinteractions. The inability to complete this task when presented via video may indicate an inability tolearn from screen media. We concur with Scofield and Williams’ (2009) explanation for this finding:toddlers’ inability to disambiguate a novel word is linked to the absence of expected social or contex-tual cues that are typically present during live interactions. Social cues also helped older toddlers (i.e.,27-months) distinguish intentional actions from unintentional actions when delivered via voice-overson video screens (e.g., pursuing versus wandering; Poulin-Dubois & Forbes, 2002, 2006). In these twostudies, younger toddlers (i.e., 21-months) had difficulty using the social cues to learn actions con-veyed by voice-overs. Instead, they relied on perceptually salient cues to make sense of novel wordsand actions. These findings are likely due to a limited cognitive capacity that interfered with simulta-neous processing of both the aural and visual content simultaneously. Because their cognitive re-sources were limited, their attention was guided by perceived salience rather than semantic meaning.

Considering these studies together reinforces our hypothesis that the features used during theinteractions, whether addressed or overheard and whether onscreen or live, play a more importantrole than the medium used to deliver the interactions. This interpretation is further supported bythe initial failure to learn from either the live or televised directed address conditions. Adding inappropriate social and contextual cues to the live addressed condition in O’Doherty’s et al. (in press)study was enough to satisfy their toddlers’ social expectations about the interaction and, as a result,support word learning. The absence of those cues in Scofield and Williams’ (2009) study did not impairinitial learning or extension; however, the ability to apply a novel label to a novel object is likelydependent on particular social cues or conventions that were absent in this study. By 3 years ofage, social cues are not as important in learning new words (Roseberry et al., 2009; Scofield & Wil-liams, 2009). The larger implication of this research is that language acquisition can occur regardlessof the source of linguistic input if key social cues and conventions match infants’ and toddlers’ expec-tancies about how an exchange should or will unfold.

The studies above used researcher-developed stimulus videos to test word learning. Within com-mercially-produced media stimuli, opportunities to learn language from overheard linguistic content


occur when infants and toddlers watch narrative-formatted screen media (e.g. Arthur and Friends).Narratives present characters whose actions and dialogue tell a story or sequence of events. These ac-tions and exchanges create a screen media situation that parallels the live overheard linguistic contentdescribed above. There is limited evidence that viewing narratives predicts better language skills. At30-months, toddlers who viewed narrative-style programs beginning as early as 6 months demon-strated larger productive vocabularies and communicated more during semi-structured play situa-tions compared with those who watched minimal to no narrative content (Linebarger & Walker,2005). In that study, only Arthur and Friends and Clifford the Big Red Dog were included as narratives.In a new analysis of this dataset, we combined multiple narratives into one viewing category to testthe hypothesis that narrative formats more broadly supported language development (i.e., Arthur andFriends, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Dragon Tales, Winnie the Pooh, Maisy and Friends, Thomas the Tank En-gine; Linebarger & Vaala, 2008) and found effects consistent with those reported in Linebarger andWalker (2005).

If the key aspects of learning from ‘‘overheard” screen media content involve the structure and con-tent of the stimuli including the use of dialogue and appropriate social cues, then it follows that over-hearing dialogue that features inappropriate or poor language models and social cues that do notsupport understanding may inhibit language learning. There is evidence that using unsophisticatedforms of language is linked to poorer language skills overall (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymmerman,& Levine, 2002). Viewing Teletubbies, a program where characters interacted with each other usingbaby talk (e.g., babbling, mostly single words), predicted smaller vocabularies and less expressive lan-guage use during play (Linebarger & Walker, 2005). Experimentally, infants and toddlers were unableto learn words presented in a Teletubbies clip while interacting with a live person and watching a re-searcher-developed clip where the onscreen person simulated an interactive exchange with viewerssupported word learning (Krcmar et al., 2007). Future research needs to test for effects at multipleand younger ages especially because overhearing in live contexts has been tested down to only 18-month-olds.

Embedded explicit language-prompting routines

Routine language exchanges provide the framework through which language development can oc-cur. The nature and quality of this development is dependent upon the nature and quality of linguisticcontent to which infants and toddlers are exposed. When adults and more competent language usersdeliver linguistic content that follows infants’ leads, engages in a joint-attentional frame around anobject, event, or behavior of shared focus, contingently reinforces infants’ attempts to communicatearound that shared focus, and models and sustains a conversation across multiple turns, infants’and toddlers’ language will be more developmentally sophisticated and more richly diverse (Hoff,2006). Conversely, when adults and other language users use more directive statements (e.g., put yourshoes on, sit down) and prohibitions (e.g., stop that, shut up), infants and toddlers will communicateless frequently and, by age three, will have vocabularies that are half the size of their peers whose par-ents engage in language-promoting talk more frequently (Hart & Risley, 1995). Both supportive andinhibitive language-promoting strategies not only predict vocabulary at 3 years, they also predictschool achievement during elementary school in the same ways (Walker et al., 1994).

Screen media have been able to incorporate supportive linguistic forms that mimic these ‘‘explicitprompting routines” (Brown, 2000, p. 225). According to Brown, explicit prompting routines occurwhen children are told what to say. We have expanded this definition to include not only specificdirection regarding what to say but also multiple prompted exchanges that sustain a conversationacross multiple turns. While screen media technology constraints limit a character’s true ability tointeractively communicate with a viewer, onscreen characters can simulate interactivity by speakingdirectly into the camera as if to engage in a ‘‘live” or ‘‘face-to-face” interaction. Simulated interactivityvia explicit prompting routines entails asking the viewer a question, encouraging the viewer to engagein verbal or nonverbal actions, pausing to give the viewer an opportunity to respond, and providingfeedback and praise that is generally affirmative and modestly contingent (e.g., in Dora the Explorer,Dora asks viewers which part of the story they liked the most, then she pauses to give viewers achance to respond, and then follows up by saying ‘‘I liked that part, too”).


Recent experimental studies have causally linked the use of explicit prompting routines embeddedin both researcher-developed and commercially produced content to multiple indices of informationprocessing and content learning including greater levels of attention to a target object (Briganti & Co-hen, 2007; Cleveland & Striano, 2008), more successful object retrieval attempts (Troseth, Saylor, &Archer, 2006), and increased learning of specific target words (Krcmar et al., 2007). In each study, suc-cessful processing of linguistic content was strengthened via repetitive and extended use of language-prompting routines. The absence of these routines predicted less word learning and a greater inabilityto retrieve a hidden object (Krcmar et al., 2007; O’Doherty et al., in press; Troseth, 2003; Troseth et al.,2006).

In one longitudinal descriptive study, parents who reported that their infants watched screen con-tent loaded with multiple explicit prompting routines (i.e., Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer) also reportedlarger vocabularies for their infants. In a separate assessment of their expressive language use whileplaying conducted by our project staff, infants who spent more time between 6 and 30 months watch-ing these programs used more language and more sophisticated language (i.e., single and multipleword utterances) while playing (Linebarger & Walker, 2005).

Most children’s programs use relatively few explicit prompting routines, programs like Blue’s Clues,Super Why, and Dora the Explorer feature curricula built around these routines as key learning devices.Similar to live language exchanges, screen media content containing explicit prompting routines arebetter able to structure the viewing experience, direct attention to relevant or central content, andencourage infants and toddlers to become more actively involved with that content. Each of thesecomponents contributes additively to infants’ processing of screen media content. Future researchshould focus on identifying the essential linguistic devices that support language acquisition as wellas those that may interfere with or overwhelm an infant’s or toddler’s processing of content.

Expository and expository/narrative hybrids and language learning

Expository or information programs represent another macro-genre that influences whether andhow infants and toddlers process screen content. The programs in this genre are formed by linking to-gether multiple vignettes that range from little- to loosely-connected around a particular topic, con-cept, or category (e.g., horses, animals who swim). Programs representative of the traditionalexpository format include infant-directed videos like Baby Einstein, Eebees Adventures, and Brainy Baby.

Narrative/expository hybrids also use multiple vignettes to deliver episode content. The main dif-ference between a hybrid and a traditional expository format is that the hybrid connects vignettes the-matically as well as sequentially. Individual vignettes are tied to the overall episode theme while thevignettes as a whole are linked together through a series of sequentially-related of events. Programsrepresentative of the hybrid format include Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and Barney and Friends.Traditional expositories and hybrids are fairly heterogeneous in structural composition and linguisticcues that are dependent upon the underlying purpose or goal of the presented content (Duke & Kays,1998; Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009). Both composition and cues are derived from the overall purposeof a particular program: comparisons and contrasts, cause and effect, problems and solutions, numer-ical and chronological sequencing, detailed descriptions of multiple exemplars (see Duke (2003), for adiscussion of expository purposes and subsequent structural features).

Research examining the impacts associated with these expository format types is mixed. Experi-mentally, Robb et al. (2009) found that infants did not demonstrate evidence of productive or recep-tive word learning after viewing an infant-directed expository program for 6 weeks (i.e., BabyWordsworth). Learning effects, in contrast, were found by Vandewater (2010). In this study, infantsviewed the same infant-directed expository video repeatedly for 16-weeks (i.e., Brainy Braby). Whencompared with Robb et al. (2009), babies in the Vandewater study experienced nearly three times theexposure as those infants in Robb et al. (2009). In Vandewater’s study, parents completed both con-tent-specific and normative assessments of expressive and receptive language knowledge. After theintervention viewing period concluded, post-test assessments determined that infants viewing BrainyBaby knew 1.3 more DVD-specific words and that word learning skills arising from viewing the stim-ulus transferred to gains of 4.9 more words on the normative assessment when compared with infantswho did not view the DVD.


As with the experimental studies, the correlational studies are also mixed. In a cross-sectionalphone survey, parents were asked to report how much time their infants and toddlers spent watchingsix different content types. From these surveys, Zimmerman and colleagues (2007b) reported thatwatching ‘‘baby videos” predicted significant decrements in vocabulary size for infants between 8-and 16-months. Linebarger and Vaala (2008) reported that infants who watched infant-directedexpository content equivalent to the Zimmerman et al. (2007b) definition of ‘‘baby videos” used lan-guage while playing less frequently than those who did not watch these DVDs. In contrast to Zimmer-man et al. (2007b), vocabulary size was larger for infants whose parents indicated that they watchedthis content type.

Methodologies used in studies of relations between media use and outcomes are predicated on theability to collect accurate and detailed information about both the level of exposure and the identifi-cation of particular content categories. In the Zimmerman et al. (2007b) study, researchers providedparents with exemplars for each of six different content categories. Then, parents were asked to cat-egorize their infants’ and toddlers’ viewing habits into one of six categories based on the providedexemplars. Only one exemplar was provided to parents for the ‘‘baby videos” category (i.e., Baby Ein-stein). Parent report is subject to multiple biases; however, parents must be used to gather this type ofinformation involving children this young. Because parent report is fraught with reporting errors,researchers need to be especially vigilant in reducing bias where possible. In the Zimmerman et al.(2007b) study, content categorization by parents even when they were given exemplars to assist inthis categorization is one such area. In samples of middle- to upper-middle income educated parents,there is a tendency to over-report activities thought to be educational or supportive of their child’sdevelopment (Hofferth, 2006). Many parents believe that screen media labeled educational play animportant role in their children’s educational development (Garrison & Christakis, 2005). Given theuse of parent report in both categorizing screen media content and identifying vocabulary knowledge,the findings in this study are tentative at best. Future research should correct these methodologicalproblems and continue to examine whether and how watching infant-directed expository contentinfluences development.

In addition to the methodological corrections suggested above, there are other explanations thatmay help to reconcile the differences between the two studies. We have found that infants need multi-ple and extended exposure to screen media content. This extended exposure provides them with timeto understand the format that, once learned, allows them to more fully comprehend the content. Inour study, watching on-air Sesame Street negatively predicted language outcomes while repeatedlywatching the same episodes of Sesame Street on a video or DVD positively predicted these same lan-guage outcomes. Next, Zimmerman and colleagues’ (2007b) viewing reflected one point in time witheffects only found for infants between 8 months and 16 months of age. The lack of significance for in-fants who were 17 months or older suggests that the impact of baby video viewing on language maybe transitory. Our sample includes nine waves of time diary content collected between 6 months and30 months of age, providing an opportunity to model a more complete picture of screen media expo-sure than is possible in cross-sectional survey research.

In addition to the processing challenges suggested above, infants who spend more time watchingthese types of programs may spend less time interacting with their parents. As noted previously, par-ents believe that infant-directed media are educationally important and able to support their babies’brain development (Christakis, 2009; Garrison & Christakis, 2005). Research also indicates that infantsand toddlers pay high levels of attention to these DVDs (Barr, Zack, Muentener, & Garcia, 2008). Par-ents who believe their infants understand and enjoy watching the content and who also perceive theDVDs as educational may feel more confident in letting their infants watch the content repeatedly andalone. In all four studies discussed above, it is not clear how infants are viewing the DVDs or whetherthe modest gains found by Vandewater (2010) were due to infants learning on their own or learningthrough some type of parent-mediated communication while viewing.

Although it’s not clear whether infant-directed expository content best represented by titles suchas Brainy Baby, Baby Einstein, or Your Baby Can Read can support or suppress language development,there is evidence that child-directed expository content and expository/narrative hybrids are linkedto lower language scores. The lack of a clear or simple storyline, the unfamiliar structural features usedto present content, and the greater volume of information contained in expository programs (see


Linebarger & Piotrowski, in press, for a content analysis) overwhelmed infants’ and toddlers’ limitedattentional resources and cognitive capacity, making it difficult to simultaneously interpret the formand content of an expository program. Knowledge acquisition occurs as the result of the formation of arepresentational hierarchy of content linking information between lower-level sensory and perceptualfeatures to higher-order cognitive and language development (Aslin & Fiser, 2005). Due to the percep-tual overload caused by the volume of information presented in expository and hybrid programs, therepresentation of the lower-level sensory and perceptual features is poorly accomplished and incom-plete. Consequently, any linkages between the lower-level features and the higher-order cognitive orlanguage processes is impaired.

Social experiences that mediate relations among language and screen media use

Both direct and indirect social experiences shape the ways that infants’ and toddlers’ languagedevelopment unfolds by providing a frame through which language exchanges occur. In addition tothe role that screen media features play in language learning, certain external factors surroundingan infant’s screen media use can also influence language acquisition directly and indirectly. Direct ef-fects occur through prolonged or repetitive exposure to the same content and adults’ use of teachingstrategies to facilitate infant comprehension (e.g., co-viewing). Indirect effects arise from the quantityand quality of adult–child interactions surrounding screen media use.

Repetition

Babies learn through repetition and consistency. They will practice over and over until they mastera new task, comprehend new content, figure out how a new toy works, or respond to and eventuallyinitiate interactions with important persons in their environment (e.g., parent, caregiver, sibling, peer).Repetition is a central feature of infants’ and toddlers’ daily social and language interactions. Theserepetitive interactions contribute to infants’ nonverbal understanding of the content and context ofthe interactions (e.g., diapering, feeding; Akhtar, 2004) by providing a bridge to language learning.By engaging in repetitive routines and social exchanges with a partner, infants develop generalizedexpectancies regarding how these exchanges should unfold and how they should interpret a conver-sational partner’s efforts to frame and sustain the interactions (Brown, 2000). Once generalized expec-tancies are in place, their consistent and predictable nature guide infants’ actions allowing them toredirect their limited attentional resources away from the events taking place during the exchangeand more toward the linguistic input used during the exchange (Akhtar, 2004; Grossmann, Gliga,Johnson, & Mareschal, 2009).

Repetitive exposure to a televised model’s verbalizations enhanced infant performance across sev-eral experimental contexts including imitation (Barr, Muentener, Garcia, Fujimoto, & Chavez, 2007;Barr & Wyss, 2008), problem solving (Richert, 2007), and word learning (Barr & Wyss, 2008; Krcmaret al., 2007; Richert & Smith, 2008; Vandewater, 2010). Barr and Wyss (2008) found that repeated no-vel verbal labels (e.g., ‘‘meewa;” ‘‘thornby”), both from parents in a live setting and from adult voice-overs embedded in screen media, aided 24-month-olds’ later imitative behaviors (i.e., observed via vi-deo presentation). In another study, 20-month-old children were able to learn words and imitate aproblem-solving task featured in an infant-directed DVD that they viewed repetitively in their homes(i.e., up to five times per week over 4 weeks) while 13-month-old infants had difficulty imitating theproblem-solving task and were unable to learn DVD-specific words (Richert & Smith, 2008; Robb et al.,2009). Infants participating in another study who watched an infant-directed DVD over 16 weeksbeginning when they were 8-months-old did demonstrate a modest increase in DVD-specific wordlearning at 15-months-old (Vandewater, 2010).

Longitudinal research has also examined the role of repetitive exposure in language acquisition.There is a sizeable body of evidence that preschoolers benefit from repetitive exposure to screen con-tent including comprehension gains and greater interaction with onscreen characters and content de-spite reductions in visual attention to the screen (e.g., Crawley et al., 1999). To examine repetition, werecoded program titles with both on-air and DVD content (i.e., Sesame Street, Barney and Friends). Our


earlier research linked expository viewing to less language use at 30-months while playing (i.e., Ses-ame Street viewers) and smaller vocabularies (i.e., Barney and Friends; Linebarger & Walker, 2005).Relations between on-air content and language outcomes remained negative while DVD content pos-itively predicted language outcomes. Both programs are expository in nature and contain a large vol-ume of information. Infants who were repetitive viewers of these programs received enough exposureto overcome processing difficulties associated with an unfamiliar format. Once format processing wasclose to automatic, infants were able to learn the featured content and generalize that content to gainsin language use while playing and vocabulary size.

Because babies have very little background knowledge and experience with screen media, repeatexposure becomes crucial for any learning or language acquisition to occur. The ability to learn fromscreen media then results from the development of expectancies regarding how screen media contentis structured generally as well as how specific content is conveyed through standard presentation for-mats. Infants and toddlers must develop a way to understand and mentally represent screen contentmore generally before they can learn specific content featured in these media and repetitive exposureaids in this process.

Co-viewing

The presence and behavior of competent others (e.g., parents, siblings, caregivers, onscreen charac-ters) while viewing screen media may impact whether and what infants and toddlers are able to learnfrom that content. Adults co-view educational screen media (i.e., 43%) with their infants and toddlersmore frequently than non-educational programs (i.e., 21%; Mendelsohn et al., 2008). There is evidenceof enhanced learning when adults co-viewed with children or when onscreen characters used similarco-viewing learning strategies within the program (i.e., questions, personalized interactions, andreflections; Tamborini & Zillman, 1985) for older children (i.e., 3 years or older; Friedrich & Stein,1975; Salomon, 1977; Tamborini & Zillman, 1985; Watkins, Calvert, Huston-Stein, & Wright, 1980).

Lemish and Rice (1986) conducted an observational study of toddlers viewing television with theircaregivers to examine whether televised stimuli could provide enough linguistic support for languagedevelopment as well as describe the process of or routine around viewing in a child’s home. Interac-tions were classified along four dimensions for both child and caregiver: designations, questions, re-sponses to adult (or child) bids, and descriptive talk. While experimental studies suggest that apotential video deficit exists (Anderson & Pempek, 2005), Lemish and Rice (1986) have provided valu-able information regarding what is happening when toddlers and their parents use screen media to-gether. One of the key features of this study is that it uses a socio-cultural or ecological framework inwhich to embed adult–child interactions as well as describe and understand how these interactionalprocesses might influence language acquisition. Very young children do engage in communicativeacts, both verbal and nonverbal, with screen content and with a parent. As discussed earlier, languagedevelopment evolves from the routine social exchanges that adults and children engage in on a regularbasis. The descriptions of sustained and complex interactions around program content indicate thatchildren and adults can engage in joint attention with screen media as the shared object of focus.

Recent research confirms these earlier findings. Specifically, Barr and colleagues examined infantlooking time, infant interactional patterns, and deferred imitation as a function of adult mediationin two situations: an adult co-viewer who was physically present with a child or an adult voice-overpaired with a screen media stimulus (Barr & Wyss, 2008; Barr, Zack, Garcia, & Muentener, 2008). In theadult co-viewer context, infants whose parents who used more questions, labels, and descriptive talkwhile viewing looked longer and viewed more interactively (i.e., vocalizations directed toward theDVD; verbal responses to the DVD or in response to parent questions; pointing; infant play definedas dancing or clapping) than infants whose parents did fewer of these behaviors. Active co-viewingby a physically-present competent other or by an onscreen character may be a particularly valuablestrategy because it functions as a scaffold for comprehension, retention, and later transfer of informa-tion learned while viewing (Barr, Zack, et al., 2008). Roseberry and colleagues (2009) tested whethertoddlers (i.e., 30-months to 42-months) could learn verbs from video stimuli when toddlers watchedthe screen media with a live actor who co-viewed with the toddlers and offered instruction in betweenshort video sequences (i.e., there was no simultaneous sequences with both video content and the live


actor providing linguistic input). Toddlers younger than 36 months were unable to learn from videoalone or from video that included onscreen co-viewers only. The video content in this study was com-mercially-produced (i.e., Sesame Beginnings) and more complex than typical researcher-developedstimuli; therefore, the amount of information, both aural and visual, may have made it too challengingor complex during the video only test as well as during the video plus video co-viewer segmentswhereas the live co-viewers may have unintentionally provided social cues or other contextual infor-mation that helped the toddlers learn the target verbs.

Quantity of adult–child interactions

The most important and most effective way for infants and toddlers to learn about the worldaround them is through interactions with important others in their environments (Gauvain, 2001;Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2006). Two studies have examined the quantity of adult–child interactionsand child outcomes. The first study used a within-subjects experimental design to test whether andhow adult–child interactions differed in the presence and absence of a television on in the background(Kirkorian, Pempek, Murphy, Schmidt, & Anderson, 2009). Infants aged 12-, 24-, and 36-months en-tered a room similar to a playroom or family room (i.e., armchair, coffee table with magazines andnewspapers, age-appropriate toys, television). Parents were instructed to do whatever they wouldnormally do at home during free play (i.e., play with their children, read a newspaper, or watchTV). For 30 min of the visit, the television was on in the background and for the other 30 min, itwas off (counter-balanced across participants). In general, parents of 12-month-olds interacted muchless with their infants than parents of 24- or 36-month olds. When the television was on, the averagenumber of adult–child interactions decreased from 68% of the time to 54% of the time. The age-relateddifferences in parental responsiveness are likely a function of the more immature interactional capa-bilities of a 12-month-old compared with the older children. Specifically, 12-month-olds engaged inverbal and nonverbal behavior about 14% of the time when the TV was off and 18% of the time theTV was on while older children engaged in verbal and nonverbal behavior about 51% of the time thatthe TV was on and 63% of the time the TV was off. Because there was no age by television status inter-action, it is likely that 12-month-olds were just generally less communicative than their older peers.Parents were also less responsive to child bids when the TV was on in the background, declining from87% when the TV was off to 79% when it was on. There were no differences in child responsiveness byTV status (i.e., 48% when the TV was off; 45% when the TV was on). Overall, with the TV on in the back-ground, most categories of parent interaction occurred less frequently than when the TV was off.

Christakis et al. (2009) reported similar results when counting the number of adult, child, and tele-vised vocalizations (i.e., any sounds or words spoken by an adult, the target child, or a television in thebackground). During episodes when the television was on, the frequency of adult- and infant-gener-ated vocalizations was lower than times throughout the day when the television was off. Theresearchers speculated that infants and toddlers living in families who allowed them to view televi-sion more frequently or families who left the television on in the background even when no onewas watching would hear less overall adult talk and would engage in fewer adult–child interactionsthat are critical to language acquisition.

Quality of adult–child interactions

The presence of media may also affect the quality of interactions between caregivers and youngchildren. In an experimental study, Kirkorian and colleagues (2009) found that two-thirds of parentshad shorter interactions (i.e., fewer turns) with their 12- and 24-month-old children when the televi-sion was on in the background versus when it was turned off. Ambient noise, particularly noise thatcontains speech, elicits an automatic orienting response and draws on cognitive resources (Baker &Holding, 1993; Kirkorian et al., 2009). Thus, adult-directed background television likely distracts’adults attention away from a young child, interfering with sustained social interactions between themand their children.

In a more recent report, Kirkorian and colleagues (2009) found that when the television was on,parents were less likely to engage in active object play (i.e., actively involved physically or verbally


in reciprocal toy play with the child), compared with passive play (e.g., putting out a hand to accept atoy from the child or verbally responding without looking at the child or engaging actively), or inter-acting without an object (Kirkorian et al., 2009). These findings indicate that television not only re-duces the amount of interaction between an adult and child, but also the quality of interactionswhen they do occur. Kirkorian and colleagues (2009) suggest that these effects operate largely throughdistracting the adult caregiver. In their study, parents were allowed to choose the television programto be aired in the room from a variety of adult programming options. Questions remain about whetherparental engagement with their children might change if the program contained infant- or child-direc-ted content or if their behavior would be different outside of the novel setting of the laboratory. Thesestudies suggest that adult-directed television in the background undermines the quantity, complexityand length of adult-child social interaction. To the extent that young children depend on direct socialinteraction to aid in language development, much background television in the home may bedetrimental.

Aggregate and adult-directed exposure to screen media: the case against background exposure

About 40% of children three and under live in homes where at least one of the television sets is onfor all or most of the day (Rideout et al., 2003). This type of exposure, referred to as background tele-vision (Anderson & Pempek, 2005), has been suggested to function as a disruption to cognitive devel-opment and other higher-order cognitive skills, causing infants and toddlers to orient to the screenrepeatedly when screen content contains perceptually salient cues (e.g., music, loud noises, sound ef-fects, peculiar voices; Calvert, Huston, Watkins, & Wright, 1982). In a series of experimental studies,researchers manipulated the presence or absence of background television and found that when thetelevision was on, the length and complexity of 12-, 24-, and 36-month old children’s play was dis-rupted (Schmidt, Pempek, Kirkorian, Frankenfield & Anderson, 2008) and the quantity and qualityof adult–child interactions were reduced (Kirkorian et al., 2009). Zimmerman and colleagues (2009)reported in a cross-sectional study that the number of conversational turns declined by .51 for everyhour of television on each day. It was not possible in this study to determine whether the televisioncontent was directed toward the child or toward the adult nor was it possible to determine the qualityof the televised content or the quality of adult interaction.

In previous research involving parents and their infants, the quality of adult–child interactions wascrucial to infant and toddler language development (Hart & Risley, 1995; Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow,2005). Without indicators of quality or type and because clear differences between foreground andbackground television exposure and between high-quality and low-quality interactions exist, it is dif-ficult to determine how these aggregate estimates (e.g., Zimmerman et al., 2009) fit into the extantresearch. Further, while television exposure predicts modestly fewer conversational turns, its effecton child language scores disappears when conversational turns and adult word counts are includedin the model. This pattern of results suggests that television negatively affects parents’ conversationalturns by displacing time that could be spent interacting with their children or by reducing the qualityof talk directed at their children. Further, parents’ general talkativeness mediated the relation betweenscreen media use and language acquisition.

Television viewing is still the dominant activity that adults do when at home. In fact, it is the onlyactivity that has not declined in use as time spent on the internet has increased (Golvin et al., 2009). Itwould be easy to conclude that household use of television displaces adult talk directed to the child(Christakis et al., 2009). Another plausible explanation is linked to parents’ general responsivenessand overall interactional style. If television was unavailable, it is likely that another activity wouldtake its place, becoming the default activity (e.g., internet use). A number of previous displacementstudies with older children and adults indicates that the introduction of a new medium most oftendisplaces time with ‘‘functionally equivalent” media or activities (e.g., Himmelweit, Oppenheim, &Vince, 1958; Kaynay & Yelsma, 2000); that is, the new medium replaces time normally spent in a prioractivity ‘‘serving the same functions. . .as the new medium” (Kaynay & Yelsma, 2000, p. 217). Televi-sion use may dominate overall time use in the home; however, it is unlikely that it displaces parentaltendencies or a willingness to interact with their children. Parental responsiveness and interactionalstyle are quite stable and fairly consistent over time. Parents who interact infrequently with their


children continue this pattern over time just as parents who engage in frequent interactions maintaina higher level of interaction over time (Hart & Risley, 1992). While television use predicts conversa-tional turns, it is likely that use is a proxy for a general parenting style rather than a specific activitythat causes parents to avoid interactions with their children.

There is much to be explored with regard to the ways in which television relates to the quantityand quality of interactions in the home. Researchers must examine media use across all membersof the household and disentangle the complicated relations between the home environment, parentaltalkativeness, quality of that talkativeness, and use of screen media by the parent and the child. Just asscreen media manifests its effects on children primarily through the content to which they are ex-posed, the relation between adult communication and child outcome is more complicated than theaggregate amount of talk. For instance, Hart and Risley (1995) did find that more talk was relatedto bigger vocabularies at age three; however, they also found that the quality of that increased talkwas substantively different and vital to language development.

Conclusion and future research

Media use is pervasive in the lives of American infants and toddlers. Despite its prevalence, thebody of research examining its impact is relatively small. Our review suggests that screen media doinfluence infants’ and toddlers’ language development. The nature and degree of influence is notstraightforward; instead, effects are dependent on a number of factors. Screen media that resemblesinfants’ and toddlers’ real-life experiences are better suited to support learning and language develop-ment (e.g., socially contingent; simple story structures; routines or objects familiar to infants and tod-dlers). Repeated exposure also helps infants and toddlers learn both the format and the content ofscreen media and can even ameliorate negative effects associated with viewing particular content(e.g., Sesame Street or Barney and Friends; Linebarger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger & Walker, 2005). Final-ly, the presence of a competent co-viewer appears to boost babies’ language learning from screenmedia, much like the ways these processes facilitate learning in live scenarios (Barr & Wyss, 2008).

The existing research suggests that early screen media use may function similarly to early linguisticinput. In a longitudinal study of children’s media use beginning at age two and continuing until agefive, viewing of child-directed educational content at age two had initial and lasting effects on multi-ple indices of school readiness while similar content viewed at age four or later was unrelated toschool readiness scores at age seven (Wright et al., 2001). The authors of that study argued that‘‘sweeping condemnations [of television] ignore the obvious fact that television contains an enormousvariety of forms and content” (p. 1347).

In order to examine specific mechanisms or aspects of babies’ learning from televised sources,many experimental researchers have utilized simple stimuli created for the purpose of their study.This careful control of content comes at the expense of external applicability. Specifically, these simplevideos, often devoid of fancy formal features and multiple simultaneous streams of information, donot resemble the commercially-produced screen media that infants and toddlers watch in theirhomes. Though we have found that young children can learn from television, significantly less isknown about what they actually do learn from non-manipulated viewing in the home. Early indica-tions suggest that content, presentation format, and repetition are linked to larger vocabularies andmore language use while playing in certain instances (Linebarger & Vaala, 2008; Linebarger & Walker,2005) and smaller vocabularies in other instances (Zimmerman et al., 2007b). Clearly, the field andyoung children will benefit from more and higher-quality research in this domain.

Final thoughts

In circumstances where the amount of high-quality research is small and the number of questionsand concerns large, it can be easy or tempting to identify or report effects consistent with a particularinterpretation at the expense of other findings that contradict this interpretation. As reviewed above,the relations among screen media use and language development are dependent on the confluenceamong child attributes, stimulus characteristics, and environmental contexts, findings remarkably


similar to research involving children who are two and older (e.g., Anderson et al., 2001; Wright et al.,2001). The primary difference between babies and older children likely lies in how complex the com-bination of structure and content in screen media is and whether attributes of the child (e.g., experi-ence) or characteristics of the child’s environment (e.g., adult co-viewing) mitigate this complexity. Aswith previous societal concerns that place the blame of declining achievement and increasing behav-ioral difficulties on media more broadly, we argue that it would be substantially more productive tomove beyond simplistic views of screen media (e.g., aggregating together all media exposure into onetotal estimate of media use) and instead focus more on conducting high-quality, scientifically-rigorousresearch to determine whether, how, and under what circumstances infants and toddlers can benefitfrom screen media as well as which content and features are less helpful and even harmful in thisregard.

Acknowledgments

Portions of the reviewed research were presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Re-search in Child Development in Tampa, Fl, April 2003 and in Atlanta, GA, April 2005 as well as atthe 2nd International Conference on Early Childhood Education, Arnhem, Netherlands. Funding forthe research conducted in our lab was provided by two different US Department of Education(DOE) Grants (H324D980066 to Dale Walker at the University of Kansas; H029D60040 to DeborahL. Linebarger) and a third US DOE cooperative agreement (U295A050003 to Deborah Linebarger).Please note, these contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the US DOE and you shouldnot assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

We thank the faculty, staff and students who have facilitated the research that informed this re-view or provided earlier feedback on this manuscript including (in alphabetical order) Rachel Barr,Kathryn Bigelow, Sandra Calvert, Sue Fenstermacher, Kara Garrity, Laura Gibson, Sanna Harjusola-Webb, Stacie Kirk, Matt Lapierre, Katie McMenamin, Daniela Rodriques, Cathleen Small, Jessica TaylorPiotrowski, Deborah Wainwright, Dale Walker. Thanks are also extended to those who participated inthese studies including teachers, families, and children.

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Linebarger - Screen Media and Language Development in Infants and Toddlers