Maternal cell phone use associated with decrease in infants' speech development

Society for Research in Child DevelopmentJun 26 2024 Research suggests that phone use may have an effect on children's speech input and language development. However, most of the prior work in this area examines parents and children in controlled laboratory experiments in public spaces and may not be representative of daily interactions between a child and their caregivers.

New research in Child Development by the University of Texas at Austin in the United States is the first to combine objective markers of speech and maternal cell phone use from cell phone logs. This research helps document the real-time effects of this phone use on speech to infants in real-world interactions. As predicted, researchers found that maternal cell phone use is associated with a 16% overall decrease in infants' speech input during real-world interactions at home.

The Society for Research in Child Development had the opportunity to interview Dr. Miriam Mikhelson and Dr. Kaya de Barbaro from the University of Texas at Austin to discuss their important findings. Dr. Mikhelson and Dr. de Barbaro: A growing number of studies are finding associations between parental phone use and children's language development. We wanted to look at the way phone use may impact the quantity of speech infants hear as a potential mechanism for this connection.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health and Whole Communities–Whole Health, a research grand challenge at the University of Texas at Austin. Summarized from an article in Child Development, "Mothers Speak Less to Infants During Detected Real-World Phone Use," by Mikhelson, M., Luong, A., Etz, A., Micheletti, M., Khante, P., de Barbaro, K. from University of Texas at Austin. Copyright 2024 The Society for Research in Child Development. All rights reserved. Journal reference:Mikhelson, M., et al. Mothers speak less to infants during detected real-world phone use. Child Development. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14125.

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