Friday, October 26, 2007

Baby-Media Products versus Social Interaction

Baby-media products business is growing rapidly, with companies that produce videos such as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius, and Brainy Baby earning millions of dollars annually. Such companies claim that they provide parents with tools that would boost up babies’ cognitive development, including language acquisition. They assert babies can acquire a broader vocabulary by passively watching their videos. However, research on the effects of social interaction is challenging these marketing claims by demonstrating both the contribution of social cues and the effects of lack of social interaction on language acquisition.
Social cues contribute to language acquisition by providing infants an interactive learning environment for mapping words to meanings. According to Baldwin (1991, 1993), infants as young as 16 to 19 months use nonverbal cues to label objects by the means of joint reference. They also use their understandings of other people’s intentions to label words (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). They associate a word with an action only if the action is performed intentionally, and avoid such association if a word is uttered accidentally during a novel action. By looking at a screen and listening to matching voices instead of social interaction, infants are deprived of such joint visual attention and communicative intentions.
The effects of such lack of social interaction in language acquisition are demonstrated by a study which compared live social interaction with televised foreign-language material (Kuhl, 2003). In this study, a group of nine-month-old infants, whose native language is English, listened to native speakers of Mandarin as the speakers read the infants books or interacted with them by showing toys. Another group of infants either saw the same speakers on a television screen or heard them over loudspeakers. Then, the infants were tested with a Mandarin phonetic contrast that does not occur in English. The infants who interacted with Mandarin speakers performed on phonetic tests better than both the control group which was not exposed to any Mandarin, and the auditory and visual exposure groups. This study suggests that regardless of which language the infants are being exposed to, language acquisition is enhanced by social interaction.
It is not only the presence of social interaction, but also its quality that affects language acquisition. To demonstrate this, Tomasello and Ferrar (1986) compared vocabularies of infants between 12 to 18 months whose mothers tend to label more or fewer objects. This study revealed that mothers who labeled fewer objects also followed their infants’ interest instead of redirecting it and such an interaction appeared to benefit the infants. Their infants performed better on language tasks than infants of mothers who labeled more things and did not follow their infants, interests. As suggested by this study, infants acquire language better through opportunities of social interaction in which they play an active part.
Infants are not recording machines. They play an active role in their own learning experience both by observing and interacting with other human beings. Companies that sell baby videos appear to ignore this active nature of language acquisition; they treat babies as passive agencies that emit information regardless of the source. They tend to ignore that their two-dimensional products cannot follow an infant’s gaze or show facial expressions in sync with the baby. As supported by infant research, current baby-media products cannot replace the social interaction infants need to prosper in language acquisition.

No comments: