Kuhl also tested whether it would make a difference if the babies heard words directly from a human being or from an audio recording or video. She and her colleagues reran their experiments using a television set rather than a human being, then ran them again with only an audio recording. “What you see here is the audio result—no learning whatsoever—and the video result—no learning whatsoever,” she told an audience at a TEDx conference. Her conclusion would seem obvious, and yet, given the amount of time young children spend with screens today and how often one sees parents staring raptly at
...more
