Do touchscreens help or hurt kids learning new words?
While simple tapping can distract toddlers from learning new words, more complex interactions like dragging objects can actually help older girls and children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds learn better.
Source
All Tapped Out: Touchscreen Interactivity and Young Children's Word Learning
What they did
In Study 1, researchers evaluated 77 children of different ages to see how they physically interacted with a touchscreen app. In Study 2, 170 children were split into different groups where they either watched an on-screen object, tapped it, or dragged it to see which method best helped them learn words.
What they found
In Study 1, children with low self-regulation tapped the screen more frequently during teaching periods compared to their peers. In Study 2, only the 4-year-old children successfully transferred their learning from the tablet to real objects. When analyzing specific groups, girls who dragged objects learned an average of 3.36 words, whereas children from low socioeconomic backgrounds learned an average of 3.09 words through dragging.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study does not show how touchscreen use impacts word learning over a long period because the research was not longitudinal. Additionally, the sample in Study 1 was primarily composed of White children from middle-class backgrounds, limiting its generalizability. Finally, because self-regulation was only measured in the youngest group, the study cannot verify how self-regulation directly influenced word learning in the older children.
Key terms
- Socioeconomic status (SES)
- A measure of an individual's or family's economic and social position in relation to others, often based on education, income, and occupation.
- Inhibitory control
- The cognitive ability to resist a strong inclination to do one thing and instead do what is appropriate or needed.
- Transfer of learning
- The ability to take information or skills learned in one context, such as a digital screen, and apply them to a different context, such as real-life physical objects.
- Prepotent response
- A highly practiced, automatic, or dominant physical or mental action that a person is primed to perform.
- Fast mapping
- The rapid process by which children learn a new word or concept after only a single or minimal exposure to it.
- Social contingency
- Back-and-forth social interaction where the actions of one person are directly and immediately responsive to the actions of another.
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What is the video deficit effect in early childhood learning?
Common questions
Why did dragging help girls learn more than boys in this study?
Girls in this age group typically have more advanced fine motor skills and self-regulation than boys, which may have allowed them to focus on the challenging dragging action and link it to the word learning, whereas boys may have found the dragging task too distracting or difficult.
Can very young toddlers learn words from tablets at all?
Yes, toddlers can learn a new word from a screen initially, but they struggle to maintain this learning over multiple trials because they get distracted by the physical urge to tap the screen.
How does a family's socioeconomic status relate to touchscreen use in this study?
Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in this study spent significantly more time using touchscreens daily compared to children from middle- and high-socioeconomic backgrounds, which may have made simple tapping feel too repetitive or less engaging for them.
What is the transfer deficit mentioned by the researchers?
The transfer deficit is a developmental phenomenon where young children struggle to apply information or skills they learn from a digital screen to real-life physical objects or situations.
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