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Infants learn language from high-quality, responsive interactions with other people, usually their parents, for a host of reasons that research by my team and others is helping us to understand. They don\u2019t learn from apps, television, or videos, even those that are labelled as \u201ceducational<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n This reality flies in the face of a common misconception that screen time can be learning time. It\u2019s an understandable mistake. Babies stare at the screen, enraptured by what they see. But that attention and focus is misinterpreted as a signal that they\u2019re learning.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that babies are drawn to visually changing fields, colours, sounds and movement, and they find them interesting. But that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re processing the language that accompanies the otherwise appealing images and sounds.<\/p>\n \u201cBabies were asked, for example, to point out objects such as a flower. Those babies who had interacted with their mothers knew the word. Those who had watched the DVD didn\u2019t learn the word.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a study by Patricia Kuhl<\/a>, for example, an adult spoke Mandarin to babies raised by English-speaking parents. Other babies instead watched a video of someone speaking Mandarin in precisely the same way. Infants exposed to the live speaker learned to discriminate among the speech sounds of Mandarin. In contrast, those who watched the video learned virtually nothing.<\/p>\n In another study, mothers were asked to take every opportunity to say various words to their babies<\/a> for what was around them \u2013 such as \u201cflower\u201d, \u201cgrass\u201d, and \u201cwater\u201d \u2014during everyday interactions. Other moms were given access to a DVD that contained the same words and their pictures. They played the DVD to their babies repeatedly. Later, the babies were asked to point out what they had been taught. Babies who were exposed to the words in the course of their interactions with their mothers had learned the words. Those who watched the DVD had not.<\/p>\n