Poster #237 - Screen Media Exposure and Children’s Vocabulary Development: A Meta-Analysis

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Technology, Media & Child Development

Integrative Statement

Despite consistent advocacy that young children have “a critical need for direct interactions with parents” (AAP, 1999, p. 342), children 2-7 years watch on average 2 hours of television daily (Rideout, 2017). Some educational programming may provide rich language input (Schmidt et al., 2009) while also displacing time spent interacting with parents (Vandewater et al., 2006). Thus, it is critical to evaluate the impact of screen time as a pervasive environmental context for language learning. However, decades of research have produced mixed results regarding screen media and vocabulary development. Conflicting results may be due to inconsistent manipulation across studies, lack of a unified definition of media exposure, and overgeneralization of language outcome measures, among other things. A summative study that clarifies these ambiguities would provide a better understanding of the role played by screen media, which would be particularly useful to parents and educators. Guided by the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (Valkenburg & Peter, 2013), we address the conditions under which early media exposure impacts vocabulary development by considering not only “whether” but also “which, when, how, and why”.

This meta-analysis included 23 effect sizes with 4,936 children from 7 cross-sectional, 5 experimental, and 3 longitudinal studies examining the relation between media exposure and vocabulary-related outcomes. In addition, we examined five factors that might influence the strength of this relation: children’s age, study design (cross-sectional, longitudinal), method (experiment, quasi-experiment, survey), independent variable type (general TV, educational TV, interactive media), and dependent variable type (receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary).

As predicted, we found no significant overall main effect of media exposure (g = .009, 95% CI = [-.40, +.58], p = .724) on children’s vocabulary development (Figure 1), suggesting that in general early media exposure does not impact children’s vocabulary development. However, there was a medium positive effect (ES = .58, 95% CI = [.19, .74], p = .032) on vocabulary comprehension and a medium negative effect (ES = -.46, 95% CI [-.89, -.04], p = 0.031) on vocabulary production. One possible interpretation is that television exposure could benefit children’s ability to understand and recognize words but impair their expressive competency. Contrary to our hypotheses, there was no difference in children’s word learning as a function of media type. Even interactive media that aim to simulate real-life experiences and reciprocal interaction were not found to benefit children’s expressive vocabulary. However, interactive media studies have small sample sizes, so more research is needed to increase statistical power. Notably, evidence supports a long-term rather than immediate effect of media use on children’s vocabulary. Moreover, effects did not depend on the research environment, thus experiments conducted in experimental settings could be well applied to naturalistic contexts.

This research highlights the nuanced effect of media exposure on children’s vocabulary development and underscores the urgent need to produce educational media that help children to not just learn media-presented vocabulary but also transfer specific learning to more generalized vocabulary gains and stronger language abilities.

Authors

• Mengguo Jing, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Heather Kirkorian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marie-Louise Mares, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author