Scientists find that children whose families use screens a lot have weaker vocabulary skills — and videogames have the biggest negative effect. Research shows that during the first years of life, the most influential factor is everyday dyadic face-to-face parent-child verbal interaction

Screen devices are everywhere: we use them for entertainment, connection, and critical day-to-day functions. But Estonian scientists find that screens can have a negative effect on children’s language development. They surveyed hundreds of families about their screen use and their young children’s language abilities, and found that no form of screen use had a positive effect on language skills. Time spent gaming had a notable negative effect on language skills, regardless of whether the child or adults in the family played.

Screens have become ubiquitous in our daily lives — which means they’ve also become part of children’s lives too. So what effect does this have on children’s developing brains, especially critical language skills? To understand this, scientists in Estonia surveyed the parents of more than 400 children about their screen use, their children’s screen use, and their children’s language skills. They found that parents who use screens a lot also have children who use screens a lot, and that children’s higher screen time is associated with poorer language skills.

“Our study reveals that children’s screen use patterns are similar to those of their parents,” said Dr Tiia Tulviste of the University of Tartu, lead author of the study in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology. “Child language researchers emphasize the importance of everyday interactions with adults in early language development, where children are actively involved. At the same time, we know that all family members tend to their screen devices. Because time is finite, we need to find out how this fierce competition between face-to-face interaction and screen time affects child language development.”

[https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psychology/articles/10.3389/fdpys.2024.1404235/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psychology/articles/10.3389/fdpys.2024.1404235/full)

This is totally anecdotal, but playing video games (mostly rpgs) had me faced with a lot of words I just didn’t know and wouldn’t have found out about otherwise. I can’t say that I cracked open a dictionary to learn but it made me aware of how they could be used.