No wonder Americans call television the "boob tube". Infants vocalise less and hear fewer words from nearby adults when the TV is on, a new study of recorder-toting infants suggests.
"There's no question that human voice and human words are what babies need," says Dimitri Christakis, a paediatrician at the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study. "The data are not yet conclusive about the fact that television is harmful, but they continue to mount."
Christakis' team equipped 329 infants, aged between 2 and 48 months, with lightweight recorders that captured every noise they heard in a 24-hour period. A computer program - shown in a previous study to be 82 per cent accurate - then determined whether each sound came from the infant, an adult or the television.
The analysis showed that for every hour of television an infant is exposed to - they don't understand television programmes, Christakis says - he or she hears 770 fewer words from adults, on average, a 7 per cent reduction. Infants watching TV also utter fewer "googoos" and "gagas" and interact less with adults than children whose parents use the off switch more enthusiastically.
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