Editorial: Language Development in the Digital Age

摘要

INTRODUCTION\nThe digital age is changing our children’s lives and childhood dramatically. New technologies\ntransform the way people interact with each other, the way stories are shared and distributed, and\nthe way reality is presented and perceived. Parents experience that toddlers can handle tablets and\napps with a level of sophistication the children’s grandparents can only envy. In Great Britain, a\nrecent survey of preschoolers shows that a rising number of toddlers are now put to bed with\na tablet instead of a bedtime story. In the USA, a telephone survey of 1,009 parents of children\naged 2–24 months (Zimmerman et al., 2007a) documents that by 3 months of age, about 40% of\nchildren regularly watched television, DVDs or videos, while by 24 months the proportion rose to\n90%. Moreover, with the advance and exponential use of social media, children see their parents\nconstantly interacting with mobile devices, instead of with people around them. Still, research in\nthe US indicates that assistive social robots seem to have a favorable effect on children’s language\ndevelopment (Westlund et al.).\nExisting theories of language acquisition emphasize the role of language input and the child’s\ninteraction with the environment as crucial to language development. From this perspective, we\nneed to ask: What are the consequences of this new digital reality for children’s acquisition of the\nmost fundamental of all human skills: language and communication? Are new theories needed\nthat can help us understand how children acquire language? Do the new digital environment and\nthe new ways of interaction change the way languages are learned, or the quality of language\nacquisition? Is the use of new media beneficial or harmful to children’s language and cognitive\ndevelopment? Can new technologies be tailored to support child growth and, most importantly,\ncan they be designed to enhance language learning in vulnerable children?\nThese questions and issues can only be addressed by means of an interdisciplinary approach that\naims at developing new methods of data collection and analysis in a longitudinal perspective. This\ntype of research is however not yet documented.