What babies, infants, and toddlers hear on Fox/Disney BabyTV: An exploratory study.

Abstract

Sound and music are integral components of screen content. Yet, little research has been undertaken exploring soundscapes of infant-directed broadcasts. The current study implements a soundscape analysis of a representative corpus broadcast on Fox/Disney BabyTV for young children between the ages of 0 and 3 years; we considered both musical and linguistic constituents as structural components of the soundscape. The current study randomly selected 1 episode from each of the 39 series broadcast on the BabyTV channel; these were viewed 5 times (195 episodes, 682.5 min). Rater coding was based on 2 in-house developed measures: the Soundscape Appraisal of Broadcast Series and the Sulkin Infant Song Inventory. The results indicate that the sound and music constituents used attract young viewers to the screen but are developmentally inappropriate, as they do not facilitate young viewers engagement with the screen (singing and body movement). Moreover, as linguistic constituents are mostly nonintelligible utterances, not only might young viewers be hampered in recall of content, but they would not benefit from screen exposure toward developing more comprehensible speech and language. This article calls for the need of writers and producers of media screen content to design more suitable developmentally appropriate programs for baby-, infant-, and toddler-viewers.

Early language outcomes in Argentinean toddlers: Associations with home literacy, screen exposure and joint media engagement

“…van den Heuvel et al (2019) state that screen exposure may not be appropriate for children younger than 30 months, since they are not capable of learning language from it; secondly, it has been found that, in general, TV shows directed to young children are not actually appropriate for their age range. Brodsky and Sulkin (2020) analysed the music and sound of episodes of series for 0‐ to 3‐ year‐olds and discovered that, although they seem to attract children, they do not promote screen interactions and, as a result, do not contribute to their cognitive development. Moreover, as linguistic constituents are for the most part unintelligible utterances, no opportunity is created for the kid to develop a more comprehensible language.…”

What does the Cat in the Hat know about that? An analysis of the educational and unrealistic content of children’s narrative science media.

“…Furthermore, it was not the case that some unrealistic elements were more common in books as opposed to videos; videos were more unrealistic across the board. This might be due to the fact that the video medium inherently has more methods for presenting unrealistic content, as videos can contain unrealistic sounds and movements in addition to linguistic and visual depictions (Brodsky & Sulkin, 2020). This content analysis used identical coding categories for books and videos to facilitate direct comparisons between these two types of media, but future work should aim to characterize more precisely how unrealistic soundscapes or other aspects of a story’s depiction may contribute to its overall level of unrealism.…”