Phone use and language development: "Mum, put that phone away!": Fryske Akademy

"On the street, you already don't look up to it: parents walking behind the pram with smartphone in hand. But if parents are too distracted by their phones, it slows down their child's language development." So writes Evelyn Bosma, language scientist at the Fryske Akademy, in a new article in HP / De Tijd (November 2022). And there are more drawbacks. "Babies get upset by expressionless faces."

"Attention is an important prerequisite for learning"

In the article, Bosma cites other studies in line with a research proposal she worked on four years ago. "In a study with children between one-and-a-half and two years old, researchers from New Zealand recently showed that the more audible notifications parents received per hour on their smartphones, the less responsive they were to their children. This then caused the children's vocabulary development to be slower." Other studies also show that smartphone use affects children's language development. "The more parents were on their phones during daily activities with their children, the worse the children scored on vocabulary and grammar."

Impact on Frisian

At Omrop Fryslân, in the programme Onderweg (1 November, 4-6 pm ), Bosma talked about her article and about possible consequences for the Frisian language. Whether phone use also interferes with Frisian, Bosma did not dare to say for sure, as this has not yet been researched. "I did do research earlier on the importance of reading aloud in Frisian and in Dutch for children's language development. There we saw that reading aloud was much more important for Frisian language development than for Dutch. This is probably because children are more dependent on their parents for language development in Frisian. [... ] If you think through in this line, it may also be the case that parental phone use is a bigger problem for Frisian than for Dutch."