• Question: Will the children´s speaking skill be learned later, nowadays, that they use technologies since they are younger?

    Asked by bertamd to Cat, James, Martin, Mike, Nadine, Nayeli, Ricci, Sophie on 30 Jan 2018. This question was also asked by antomagali.
    • Photo: Nadine Lavan

      Nadine Lavan answered on 30 Jan 2018:

      So, I just had to Google this and found a recent study that got quite a bit of media coverage and that indeed seems to suggest that people seem to speak later when exposed to screens/technology. What’s worth noting here is that this is only one study – we need much more evidence to be really sure what’s going on and if it necessarily is a bad thing. It might be but it might also just turn out to be completely harmless. For example, children raised bilingually tend to be delayed in their development of speech, but this isn’t considered to be a problem at all since the child ends up speaking two languages in the end. So, the question with technology will probably boil down to whether the potential delays that might occur in the context of technology use are a case of children missing out on stimulation/information that is essential for a child’s development or whether it’s just a case of children developing other important skills sooner and speech lags behind a bit. We definitely need to do more work to figure this out!

Comments

  • Photo: Wendy

    Wendy commented on :

    I agree more research is needed…but I wonder if what will turn out to be more significant is not how much time children spend with electronic devices but how much time their *parents* do. Before mobile phones, you’d see mothers talking to their children when they were out with them in a stroller – they would point out the things they were passing, and the kids would learn words for those things; now, the mothers stare at their phones in silence. I would expect that difference to have a big effect.

    wg