Learning, Interrupted: Cell Phone Calls Sidetrack Toddlers' Word Learning
With our mobile technology, we listen to podcasts while washing dishes and catch up on news while checking out at Trader Joe's. Sometimes, however, our multi-tasking is not intentional, as when we receive a text during supper or a phone call while reading aloud to our children.
There has been much written about media use by children. But what are the impacts of media use by parents in the presence of their children? What happens when conversations with our children are interrupted by media?
In an article published recently in Developmental Psychology, psychologists Jessa Reed, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Golinkoff (2017) explored the effects of cell-phone interruptions during parent-child interactions on toddlers' word learning.
Parents and their 2-year old children participated in a lab-based study at Temple University. Before the study began, an experimenter demonstrated two new actions (bouncing a baby doll on one's knee and shaking a silent maraca) and labeled each ("blicking" and "frepping") for the parent.
The experimenter asked the mothers to teach each word (here verbs), one at a time, to their children. Mothers would know when to move from the first word to the next when the experimenter called them on a mobile phone. And sometimes, the experimenter mentioned, she would just call to chat.
Each child would be taught one verb in an uninterrupted condition and one verb in an interrupted condition. When the teaching period was uninterrupted, mothers had 60 seconds to demonstrate the action to their children and use the new verb in a sentence.