研究表明：看电视能提高幼儿的语言能力 - FreeOZ论坛

Many early childhood experts discourage parents from letting toddlers watch TV, but a new Australian study says that TV can help improve a child's language skills.

There is a caveat - parents have to watch as well and interact with their child during the program.
Researchers from the University of New England analysed the literacy skills of 10,000 young children and exploded a few myths.
The study's lead author, Michael Bitmann, adjunct professor with the university's department of sociology, says the tradition with this study has been that people think there is some sort of exposure model of television.
"It's a bit like skin cancer, the longer you're in front of television the more damage it's going to do," he said.
"But these studies didn't look at what parents did as well, so it turns out from this study the most important thing really is what parents do and that when you include parental behaviour in the model, then what you find is the exposure isn't important anymore.
"So for example if a parent co-watches television programs with the child then it actually improves the child's vocabulary."
But the results are not a green light for unrestricted access to the remote control.
Professor Bitmann says it is very important for parents to monitor what their youngsters are watching, and that is especially true for "worthy" programs, like the news.
"Children are often quite frightened by things on television. They can be distressed by all kinds of things," he said.
"Young children often identify very closely with animals, particularly baby animals, so if they're watching the news and they're watching chickens being killed or dead cattle carcases or the Indonesian abattoirs footage or something like that they get very distressed.
"The best antidote to that is really a bit of parental reassurance, physically and verbally."
Professor Bitmann says sometimes the best thing that parents can do with TV is turn it off.
"The other thing that parents can do is stop having television as a kind of wallpaper where it's just running all the time, or have it dominate meal time or put it in children's bedrooms because [of] a lot of unsupervised watching alone," he said.
"So, that's the one sort of negative affect you can do with television is put it in your child's bedroom."