Language Learning, Television and

To fully address the issue of television and language learning, we must consider at the very least what is meant by language development, as well as the age of the child who is attempting to learn from television. First, language learning might be divided into two broad categories, grammatical development and lexical development. Furthermore, we might also distinguish between initial language learning and vocabulary extension, the latter being a process that continues throughout life.

Overall, it appears that television can teach language in some real but limited ways. Children—and, indeed, adults—can learn new words and extend their vocabularies. However, the complexity of grammar is difficult to parse from speech—especially speech of the kind that one garners from television. After all, there is no interaction per se, and the speaker can not arrange his or her grammar to best suit the needs of the listener. Lastly, television does not appear to be able to teach initial words to toddlers.

Most research that examines preschoolers between the ages of 2 and 5 years has shown that young children can in fact acquire new words by watching television. For example, in a series of laboratory studies, Rice and colleagues showed preschoolers animated programs that contained infrequently used words (e.g., gramophone). After seeing the clip twice in the span of a week, children who saw it performed significantly better when matching the word with a picture than did control children who had not seen the clip. On average, 5-year-olds learned more than 3-year-olds.

In a similar study by Singer and Singer, children who attended a child-care program were randomly assigned either to watch 10 episodes of Barney or to engage in free play in another room at the facility, over a 2-week period. Prior to exposure, children were pretested on vocabulary words that would appear in Barney. After the exposure period, children were tested again. Children who had seen Barney performed significantly better than those in the control group on their knowledge of words used in the Barney episode.

There is also evidence from longitudinal studies, the designs of which offer greater external validity. Rice and colleagues examined the vocabulary growth of children over a 2 ½-year period. Children who watched Sesame Street more frequently experienced greater vocabulary growth even when parent education and initial vocabulary scores were controlled for. However, this finding was only true of children who were 3 years old at the beginning of the study; 5-year-olds did not make such extensive gains. Therefore, it appears from both experimental designs and longitudinal survey research that preschoolers can, in fact, learn new words from television.

[Page 463]However, it appears that children do not effectively learn grammar from television. Although the data here are not as robust, due to difficulties in data collection on this issue, correlational research studies that have examined grammatical development have found that exposure to television is negatively correlated with grammatical development. Language acquisition experts suggest that human interaction in which the learner is part of the dyad may be the only way to access the complexity of grammar.

...