Investigation of the Effect of Screen Exposure on Language Development in Children Between 16-36 Months

Abstract

Objective: Many factors affect language development in infancy and early childhood. In this study, the relationship of screen exposure of children aged 16-36 months with some familial sociodemographic data and its effect on the child’s language and speech development were evaluated with the Turkish Communication Development Inventory-II (TIGE-II). The effects of screen exposure and exposure times on language and speech development in children were investigated.

Methods: This is a single-center, cross-sectional study. 90 patients, who were hospitalized in General Pediatric Services and met the criteria for participation in the study were included. A questionnaire consisting of 25 questions created by us regarding the sociodemographic data and screen usage characteristics of the patients and their parents was applied. TIGE-II was used to measure the language development levels of children. SPSS 25.0 package program was used for data analysis and statistical significance level was accepted as p<0.05.

Results: The average age of the participants was 25 months. 58.9% were male. It was seen that 88.9% of the children were acquainted with the screen, the age at which the screen was used was before the age of 2 in all children, and 55% of the children had more than one hour of screen use in a day. The spoken word score, mean utterance length score, and case suffix scores were found to be higher than the TİGE-II scores of children who had never been exposed to screens. And also, spoken word score, word usage score, word suffix score, using more than one word in a sentence score, average utterance length score, case suffix score, verb suffix score and mixed sentence structure score according to children who started watching screen between 13-24 months, compared to children who started watching screen between 0-12 months were found to be significantly higher.

Conclusion: In our study, it was observed that screen exposure in children negatively affects language and speech development. It is predicted that family physicians questioning the child’s language development, explaining the negative effects of screen exposure, and informing families about spending quality and interactive time with children will contribute to reducing screen exposure.