Talking with adults is highly engaging and interactive for children.

The same words and phrases get repeated and iterated over in varying orders and stresses in association with immediate touchable physical objects and executable actions.

A week of that would test higher for word|association retention than would a week of watching video with { words, words, words } streaming by non stop.

Yes, I do understand that there are videos and shows that are specifically designed to engage and teach young viewers: Playschool, Sesame Street etc .. but these require far more craft than goes into the vast sea of near AI generated pap that streams these days.

If you interact with babies, you'll notice that they are looking at you with an astonished intensity. That's because every neuron in their brain is trying to understand "What is going on!?"

Humans are copy-machines. We copy each other. Toddlers and infants especially so. They don't learn by just hearing voices, they need to see how these sounds are made by a real human being with a real voice-box and real lips and real tongue, in which context they are used.

Have you ever noticed gesturing while talking to someone on the phone? That's because we constantly try to enrich the words we are making with more context.

All that is missing if toddlers are just looking at a screen. It's devastating for learning.

They mention that they didn't test for it, but I'd wager that the parents use of devices results in them speaking to the children less.

This dilemma has been named “video deficit”, the reason why children are unable to find the puppet whose location has been shown to them in a video

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...

They learn to hear (and understand) but they are not exercising speaking back, which is also important. Also, the usual pattern of "parents shoving smartphone into kids eyes to keep them busy" is with very low volume, because parents don't want to hear the frickin' video sounds.

Is all vocabulary equal? After hearing American kids started talking with British mannerisms during the pandemic from watching too much Peppa Pig why would you risk your kid learning English from "Jonny Jonny Yes Papa" or "Finger Family" broken English slop videos

Not an expert, but I have the sense that some times toddlers do things just so they can interact with adults. Knowing that I get the sense that they might learn more from an actual person than from a screen everything else being equal.

Studies show that toddlers can't learn from video.

Good point.

I wonder if the problem is children's programming.