According to an English study, vocabulary is acquired through conversation. Children who spend too much time in front of screens will have more difficulty learning words.
What if tablet computers and other computers were harmful to children’s vocabulary learning? British daily The Daily Mail reports since yesterday the results of a english study published in the journal Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, according to which the “iPad generation” – the children who regularly use tablets and computers, have more difficulty learning words.
To come to this conclusion, a team of researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London analyzed the brains of 27 volunteers who were scanned while learning invented words. The researchers then found that listening, repeating, and conversing were the keys to understanding and learning languages..
And Dr Marco Catani, study author, explain, “When learning a new word, you first start by hearing a noise, that is, trying to repeat it over and over and including it small little by little in your conversations that you will acquire it definitively. This is how you increase your vocabulary. In the end, an adult knows about 30,000 words ”.
The analyzes also revealed that an area of the brain, the arcuate beam, was very important in the learning process. It is a set of nerve fibers that connects this area responsible for listening and decoding sounds to that of speech. Brain scans of the volunteers have thus shown that making this area work through speech subsequently facilitates the learning of new words. This information is all the more important as it could also shed new light on autism or dyslexia disorders, stress these researchers.
“Now that we know that this is how we learn new words, we fear that today’s children will have less vocabulary than those before, because for new generations this learning is often done by children. screens. This research which we carried out thus reinforces the need to maintain the oral tradition by speaking as much as possible to our children ”, warns Dr. Marco Catani.
This study also confirms the feelings of some Britons who are still wary of the invasion of tablets, smartphones and other computers. A survey carried out by the Museum of Design revealed until recently that a significant proportion of them still consider the Internet as a threat to knowledge. Even though of the 994 people questioned, 53% admitted to knowing more now than before, thanks to the net, 37% of these Brits felt that the increasing use of this technology had diminished their knowledge.
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