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On average, children in the U.S. begin media viewing at age 5 months. Many videos are designed for infants and promoted as educational. To determine if young children learn words from exposure to educational videos, researchers randomized 88 English-speaking children (age range, 12–25 months) in California to watch a Baby Einstein video at home five times every 2 weeks for 6 weeks or to not watch the video.
Children's knowledge of the 30 simple words highlighted in the video (words understood, said, and identified with pictures) was assessed every 2 weeks. At 6 weeks, 37 parents completed a measure of their infants' language ability (MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory [CDI]), and all parents and children viewed the video together …