TV turns toddlers into ‘late talkers’

Sitting toddlers in front of a television or computer screen is unhelpful and may even obstruct their progress, according to a group of leading psychologists.

At the world’s biggest science forum in Vancouver, Canada, the group discussed the problem of “late talkers” — children who are slow to learn to talk and often held back in their educational development.

Studies suggest 6%-8% of all children fall into this category. Incidence rates are the same in the developed and undeveloped world.

By the age of two, a child should have a vocabulary of at least 50 words and be attempting to put together a couple of sentences. However, some are still struggling to master words at three.

Although they often seem to recover, research has shown that impairments can show up in the later teenage years.

The experts said passive listening does not provide the same stimulation as the to-and-fro interaction of personal contact.

Professor Nan Bernstein Ratner of the University of Maryland said: “There’s been recent work distinguishing between overheard speech as opposed to speech directed to the child, and overheard speech is much less effective as a predictor of what children learn than time spent actually interacting with the child.

“We have a very durable body literature that suggests that you can’t substitute the kind of input that you give a child by plopping them in front of a television. That the child still needs to be engaged back and forth with another person in order to untangle language.”

Colleague Professor Leslie Rescorla from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, said: “Children really need to have people talk to them in order for them to acquire language. Not that they don’t learn anything from television and videos, but really they need language partners.”

Prof Rescorla described a word “checklist” she developed that could help parents and child psychologists spot late talkers.

The checklist consists of 310 words, including those used most often by young children.

“Parents are asked to check off every word their child says spontaneously,” said Prof Rescorla.

Average-performing children can access around 250 to 300 words, she said, while late talkers manage 25.

Late talkers tended to use the most common toddlers’ words, such as “mummy”, “daddy”, “shoe”, “dog” and “bye bye”.

The system was tested with a study in which children were monitored for a period of 15 years.

“What we found was that the children recovered from their language delay at varying rates,” said Prof Rescorla. “By four, more of them were performing in the average range, and by the time they went to school most of them were performing in the average range.

“The not so good news was that after age 17 children performed significantly less well on all the language measures we gave. So it looked as if what we were picking up at age two was a sub-clinical but enduring relative weakness in the area of verbal language development.”