Here’s what the research says and what it could mean for families trying to support language development when screens are part of everyday life.
SCREEN HABITS SHAPING EARLY WORDS
This shift has prompted researchers to look more closely at what screen use means in the earliest years. At SMU, assistant professor of psychology Sarah Kucker has focused on how media use relates to language development in young kids. When she began her work more than a decade ago, most studies centered on television with predictable, routine programming, such as Saturday morning cartoons; far less was known about learning from phones and tablets, where content is on demand anytime across countless apps and platforms.
Kucher began with a basic question: How is the learning process when children are watching from a mobile device? “So if they want to learn a new word like duck, then learning it as a real object that you can touch is different than if it’s a picture of a duck on the phone,” she said.
In a study published in November, Kucker and her colleagues surveyed more than 380 caregivers of children ages 17 to 30 months about their child’s word use and how much video or TV the child watched. After accounting for the child’s age, overall vocabulary and socioeconomic status, the researchers found that toddlers who watched more video tended to say fewer body-part words, such as nose or arm, and more words for furniture and people, such as mom, friend or girl.
“A lot of times, those first words are going to be nouns and objects that they touch and they feel,” Kucker said, adding those words can help set the stage for building sentences and learning more complex language.
But the finding of children learning more people and furniture words was unexpected because previous research suggested that more digital media time is associated with fewer face-to-face interactions and therefore fewer opportunities to learn these kinds of words.
In another study published in October 2025, Kucker and her colleagues found the caregivers’ temperaments, and that of their child’s, influences digital media use and thereby language learning.
The researchers surveyed more than 460 caregivers of children ages 17 to 30 months and followed a smaller group of families a year later. They found caregivers who scored higher on conscientiousness — one of the “Big Five” personality traits referring to a person’s tendency to be organized, self-disciplined and goal-oriented — reported that their children spent less time with digital media. This, in turn, was linked to higher vocabulary scores.
“We also found that children who are very fussy, what we call high negative affect, tend to have higher rates of screen time,” Kucker said. “This could be that they ask for it, or the parents use it to calm them down. But when you have higher rates of screen time, you have lower language.”
Some studies suggest that when adults watch a program with a child, a practice known as co-viewing, it can support engagement with the content, rather than children watching passively. But what Kucker and her colleagues found was that even when children watched with an adult or watched educational media, the relationship between screen use and vocabulary did not change. In the October 2025 study that followed families over time, children who spent more time with digital media at age 2 tended to have smaller vocabularies at age 3, regardless of the child’s temperament or the caregiver’s personality traits.
HOW TO APPROACH SCREEN TIME
So how should parents think about screen time in everyday life? Kucker suggested a few approaches.
First, use age as a guide, Kucker said. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages digital media for children younger than 18 months, except for video chatting. For children 18 to 24 months, the association recommends choosing high-quality educational content and using it together with a caregiver.
For children ages 2 to 5, the American Academy of Pediatrics advises limiting screen time to about one hour a day of high-quality educational programs.
Kucker recommends co-viewing with your child and discussing the content with them, even if they are too young to respond. Offline, take the opportunity to use real-life events or outings to engage language skills.
“If you’re watching a video, connect what’s in the video to real life,” she said. “When you’re grocery shopping, narrate as you’re going, saying, ‘Oh, here’s the banana, do you see it? It’s yellow. Here’s the milk.’ That’s the kid’s class, that’s when they are learning the words. They are getting it because you are talking to them.”
Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas . The News makes all editorial decisions.
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