Research suggests that phone use may have an effect on children’s speech input and language development. However, most of the prior work in this are

Research Shows Maternal Cell Phone Use May Negatively Impact Infant Language Development

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2024-10-20 18:00:10

Research suggests that phone use may have an effect on children’s speech input and language development. However, most of the prior work in this area examines parents and children in controlled laboratory experiments in public spaces and may not be representative of daily interactions between a child and their caregivers.

New research in Child Development by the University of Texas at Austin in the United States is the first to combine objective markers of speech (via audio recorders worn by infants) and maternal cell phone use from cell phone logs. This research helps document the real-time effects of this phone use on speech to infants in real-world interactions. As predicted, researchers found that maternal cell phone use is associated with a 16% overall decrease in infants’ speech input during real-world interactions at home. Phone use had stronger effects on speech during some hours of the day than others, perhaps reflecting differences in how parents use their phones while caring for their infants across the day.

The Society for Research in Child Development had the opportunity to interview Dr. Miriam Mikhelson and Dr. Kaya de Barbaro from the University of Texas at Austin to discuss their important findings.