Toddlers learn their first words better from people than from Teletubbies, according to new research at Wake Forest University.
The study was published in the June 21 issue of Media Psychology.
Children younger than 22 months may be entertained, but they do not learn words from the television program, said Marina Krcmar, associate professor of communication at Wake Forest and author of the study.
“With the tremendous success of programs such as ‘Teletubbies' that target very young children, it has become important to understand what very young children are taking away from these programs,” Krcmar said. “We would like to think it could work, that Teletubbies and other programs can teach initial language skills. That is not true.”
In the study, Krcmar evaluated the ability of children ages 15 – 24 months to learn new words when the words were presented as part of a “Teletubbies” program. She then evaluated their ability to learn the new words from an adult speaker in the same room with them.
Children younger than 22 months did not accurately identify an object when taught the new word by the television program, but they were readily able to connect the word with the object when the word was presented by an adult standing in front of them, she said.
“During the early stages of language acquisition, and for children who still have fewer than 50-word vocabularies, toddlers learn more from an adult speaker than they do from a program such as ‘Teletubbies,'” Krcmar said.