Exposure to Electronic Media Between 6 and 24 Months of Age: An Exploratory Study

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Exposure to screen media in the first two years of life is a growing but understudied phenomenon. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages screen-time exposure before the age of two years (Brown, 2011), and multiple studies have identified a negative relationship between exposure to screen media in early childhood and subsequent language development (Linebarger & Walker, 2005; Tomopolous et al., 2010). Nevertheless, the media industry frequently targets infants as consumers, asserting that electronic media products are designed to offer parents and infants additional opportunities to interact, a claim which lacks support from research and requires further study. Furthermore, because previous studies with infants often lacked longitudinal data, it is currently still unknown how exposure to electronic media changes with infants’ age during the first two years of life, and how it may be affected by socio-economic status (SES). Delineating the trajectory of electronic media exposure in infancy, and understanding its relationship to SES may illuminate the mechanisms by which social disparities in language and health outcomes emerge.
Using Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) technology, we collected ecologically valid, daylong audio recordings in 24 English speaking families with infants when they were 6, 10, 14, 18, and 24 months old. SES was measured with the Hollingshead Index and ranged from medium-low to high. Exposure to electronic media and adult and infant language-related vocal activity were measured automatically with LENA’s Adult Word Count (AWC) and Child Vocalization Count (CVC). We hypothesized that infants’ exposure to electronic media would increase between 6 and 24 months, and show a negative association with SES. Furthermore, we hypothesized that AWC and CVC would decrease in the presence of electronic media.
On average, the infants in the sample were exposed to 58 minutes of electronic media daily, which is low compared to some previous estimates for this age group (Duch et al., 2013). Associations of age and SES with daily electronic media exposure were evaluated using multivariable linear mixed-effect models. Overall, average daily media exposure was not significantly associated with age (p=0.27) but exhibited a significant negative association with SES (p=0.041). There was also a significant interaction between age and SES on exposure to electronic media (p=0.010), indicating a varied association between age and electronic media exposure, depending on SES. Specifically, electronic media exposure decreased with child age, but only amongst high-SES families. In follow-up analyses, we split the daylong recordings into 5-minute intervals and confirmed our hypothesis that exposure to electronic media was negatively associated with adult language as measured with AWC (p<0.001) and infant linguistic activity as measured with CVC (p<0.001), independent of age and SES (Figure 1).
The present findings are an important step forward in examining the role of SES in exposure to electronic media and enhance our understanding of the mechanisms through which exposure to electronic media may impact linguistic development in infancy. Language learning in infancy depends on infants’ social and linguistic interactions with people around them (Kuhl, 2007), which are reduced in the presence of electronic media.

Authors

• Naja Ferjan Ramirez, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Daniel Hippe, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro, University Of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author