Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2014

Division

School of Education Counseling and Psychology in Education

Keywords

Word learning; Video; Scaffolding; Parent–child co-viewing

Disciplines

Cognitive Psychology | Developmental Psychology | Educational Psychology

Abstract

Young children frequently do not transfer information from video to real-world situations. We provided perceptual and conceptual supports to help children transfer a new word from video to physical objects and photos. An on-screen actress labeled one of two novel objects; then 24-month-olds were asked to identify the ‘modi.’ Children failed to demonstrate word learning after holding the objects while viewing (comparison condition). In a two-step transfer condition, children correctly identified the modi on a test video image but did not identify the real matching object. However, when parents pointed out that the real objects were “the same” as those on screen (scaffold condition), children demonstrated reliable transfer of the word from video to reality. This study shows that parents’ active co-viewing of videos supports transfer and suggests that toddlers’ frequent failure to learn from video stems at least partially from their lack of understanding of the relevance of video to real life.

Publication Title

Cognitive Development

Volume

30

First Page

47

Last Page

64

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2014.01.002

Comments

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520141400015X?via%3Dihub

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