Infants Learn Baby Signs From Video

Abstract

There is little evidence that infants learn from infant-oriented educational videos and television programming. This four week longitudinal experiment investigated 15-month-olds’ (N=92) ability to learn ASL signs (e.g., patting head for hat) from at-home viewing of instructional video, either with or without parent support, compared to traditional parent instruction and a no-exposure control condition. Forced choice, elicited production, and parent report measures indicate learning across all three exposure conditions, with a trend towards more robust learning in the parent support conditions, regardless of medium. There were no differences between experimental and control conditions in the acquisition of corresponding verbal labels. This constitutes the first experimental evidence of infants’ ability to learn expressive communication from commercially available educational videos.

Baby FaceTime: can toddlers learn from online video chat?

“…There was one exception to the finding that contingency mattered: in both conditions, children imitated actions during tablet sessions (Figure c) and later remembered actions in the lab (Figure b). They did not need social contingency to learn novel actions from video, a result consistent with Krcmar's () finding that 21–24‐month‐olds learned actions from video more readily than words and with Dayanim and Namy's () finding that 15‐month‐olds learned symbolic gestures from video. These findings appear inconsistent with Nielsen et al .…”

“…Infants imitate novel actions early in the second year (Meltzoff, ) and deferred imitation is often used to examine preverbal infants’ learning from media (Barr & Hayne, ; Krcmar, ). Furthermore, 15‐month‐old children can learn symbolic gestures from repeated viewings of pre‐recorded videos (Dayanim & Namy, ) at an age when they accept a broad range of symbolic forms in communication (e.g. words, pictures, gestures) (Namy, ).…”

“…If the social contingency provided by video chat changes children's experience and cognitive processing of it, then we should see a contingency condition effect in which children in the FaceTime condition outperform those in the Video condition on all cognitive and social outcome measures. In addition, we expected several age‐by‐condition interactions to unfold differently depending on the measure: the contingency effect may be weakest in the youngest age for the action learning measure because deferred imitation from non‐contingent video is possible beginning at 15 months (Barr & Hayne, ; Dayanim & Namy, ; Krcmar, ). For novel word learning, the effect of contingency should be strongest in the oldest age group compared to the youngest.…”

Children and Adolescents and Digital Media

“…Dayanim and Namy showed that 15-month-olds could learn the meaning of sign language symbols after 3 weeks of watching a commercially available video 4 times per week. 24 However, children in a comparison study group whose parents used a book of sign language symbols to teach the content retained more knowledge about the symbols' meanings for a longer period of time.…”

Children aged 6–24 months like to watch YouTube videos but could not learn anything from them

“…Nevertheless, Kabali et al observed that slightly older children liked to watch videos on YouTube and other video sharing websites. Dayanim and Namy found that children aged 15 months could learn signs for expressive communication from videos. However, young children preferred to interact more with the real world than watching videos.…”