It’s not uncommon today to see children glued to their screens. In fact, 80% of parents with children 11 or younger say their kids watch YouTube videos, according to a . Half of these parents say their kids watch videos every day – some even several times a day.

But staring at a screen for too long can negatively impact children’s well-being – . According to research, kids demonstrate when their screen time surpasses one hour a day. They are also more likely to experience anxiety and depression and suffer from . Even short, fast-paced videos have consequences, impacting the .

I believe it is essential to explore how to use technology in a way that can positively impact children’s ability to think and communicate. Audiobooks present a compelling case.

Starting around , most children can comprehend simple stories and fairy tales. Audiobooks can be particularly useful during car rides, bedtime routine and quiet playtime. For school-aged children, they can by providing an alternative way to experience books. And most importantly, they can – much more than videos.

Here are five ways that audiobooks can enhance children’s ability to learn:

Enhances imagination and intelligence

Unlike videos, which provide visual and auditory stimuli, audiobooks rely solely on listening. This encourages children to visualize the story in their minds, . In contrast, passive videos provide preformed images that require no voluntary imagination.

Unlike , which happens spontaneously and unintentionally, such as in a dream during sleep, is the deliberate effort to create new images in the mind. People are not born with this ability. Rather, it must be during childhood through conversations and engagement with stories and fairy tales.

Research indicates that voluntary imagination leads to . In fact, training voluntary imagination is .

Develops listening skills and attention span

Listening to audiobooks requires children to focus and pay attention to the spoken word, promoting the . Unlike the passive consumption of videos, where the visual component dominates a child’s attention, comprehending an audiobook demands active listening. This can improve a child’s ability to concentrate and maintain attention for longer periods.

Expands vocabulary and language skills

Audiobooks are a valuable tool for expanding a child’s . Exposure to rich and varied language allows children to encounter new words and phrases in context, which aids in .

Compared with print books, audiobooks feature expressive narration, which can model proper pronunciation, intonation and rhythm.

Encourages independent learning

Audiobooks can foster a sense of independence in young children as they create their own unique vision of the scenes and events described in a book. This can cultivate a habit of independent learning as children follow complex narratives, infer meaning and make connections between different parts of the story. This self-directed learning approach can and lay a strong foundation for future academic success.

Preserves eyesight

Excessive screen time can strain children’s eyes, leading to discomfort and potential , including nearsightedness. Audiobooks, on the other hand, eliminate the need for screens, giving children’s eyes a much-needed break.

Audiobooks are a powerful tool for enhancing a child’s cognitive and linguistic development, and many are available for free at local libraries or on apps like . As parents and educators seek to nurture smarter and more well-rounded children, audiobooks can play a significant role.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

What we don’t yet know is how to address the tragedy on a scale that’s a match for the mountain. Researchers have demonstrated some encouraging interventions, but, says New York University professor and child-literacy authority Susan Neuman, the majority of this work has been small-scale studies conducted in optimal conditions.

“Most of our interventions,” Neuman says, “were with about a hundred kids. We wanted to move beyond that. We wanted to focus on thousands of children and see if could provide an intervention that could help children grow, knowing that teachers seem to have little time to teach vocabulary.”

From her years as a researcher, educator, and early learning and literacy policymaker, Neuman knew that vocabulary offers the keys to the kingdom for children’s learning; she also knew that vocabulary is rarely taught in school. In 2007, she developed a supplementary curriculum for pre-K through first grade called . The idea was to teach vocabulary in a way that excites children and encourages them to be eager for words that can help them negotiate their worlds — eagerness is the key — and to provide teachers a supplemental curriculum that supports them in teaching those words.

“We were using the World of Words, a curriculum that we created in 2007, at schools throughout the Bronx in New York — one of the areas in the country with the highest poverty,” Neuman says. In the Bronx, a New York City school district, more than 176 languages are spoken and many of the children need a great deal of support learning English. “Teachers may struggle with how to teach kids who are bilingual. Teachers look at their multilingual classes and say, ‘What can I possibly do?’”

“What we do is read aloud to the children and introduce them to what we call ‘exciting topics,’” she says. “Wild weather, the mysteries of science — they’re fascinated by these things. We wanted a curriculum that would really engage them and give them a reason to communicate and talk with others. You can’t have a conversation if there’s nothing to talk about. World of Words plugs into their curiosity and fascination.”

Evidence from a number of trials showed encouraging results in teaching children through the World of Words curriculum. The lessons were heavily scripted, some featuring word-for-word scripts for what teachers were to say, to ensure fidelity to the design. The results were an improvement, but teachers struggled to incorporate and master the strategies in the designed curriculum and frequently weren’t able to replicate the researchers’ progress. Neuman and her research team knew that the teachers were the key if a scalable program were to be possible. If teachers didn’t embrace the program, it just wouldn’t catch on.

In looking at what was missing, Neuman realized there wasn’t any room in the program for teacher agency and individuality.

“There are local strategies that teachers know regarding how to deal with their students that someone like me can’t even imagine,” she says. “We’ve got to allow teachers to adapt and create on their own within an overall structure.”

The solution was a “soft-scripted” program that provides an overall framework with sufficient room for the teachers to respond in the moment as their individual classes interact with the material. There are non-negotiables in terms of content and structure, but also autonomy for the teacher to adapt in real time.

“For example, in this particular curriculum, we teach words through taxonomies — the categories that can help children infer meaning. So, for example if I know that a banana is a type of fruit and a strawberry is a type of fruit, I can infer that fruit is good for children to eat.

“One of the questions we always ask is, ‘What is similar and what is different?’ And this is what we learned: The ‘script’ in the program encouraged teachers to talk about similarities and differences, but this teacher recognized that the children didn’t know what these terms actually meant. So, the teacher stopped — good teachers stop — and did a whole mini-lesson on the terms ‘similar’ and ‘different.’ It was a lovely example of a teacher taking the time to know when their children weren’t getting it.

In another example, the lesson focused on shapes, and the teacher asked the children, “What is a triangle?” One of the children responded, “A triangle has three sizes!” Instantly the teacher recognized that the child didn’t understand the properties of a triangle.  So, she stopped the lesson, went to the board, and illustrated what a triangle looked like, emphasizing the words “sides.”

“That lesson was never scripted, but she had the wherewithal to realize that the children weren’t getting the question and to address it.”

Another place where Neuman and her team saw that the scripted program wasn’t working was in its instruction to have the teachers ask open-ended questions, such as, “What did you think about that story?”

“It turns out that the teachers were never asking the higher-order, open-ended questions — for a variety of reasons. If I ask an open-ended question, I may not understand what the child is saying and may need more time for them to explain. He might take up to a minute and while that is going on, what are the other kids doing? They’re getting unruly. So, the teacher has her eye on all the kids in the class and just skips the open-ended question.”

The solution, Neuman found, was our old friend , that serve-and-return interaction that keeps a conversation going. The practice of shared book reading has been proven to contribute to children’s vocabulary and comprehension, but studies suggest that it’s the “extratextual talk” that surrounds the book-reading that really amplifies the children’s understanding.

Recent studies using LENA (Language Environment Analysis) recorders have found that the number of conversational turns the children and teachers engaged in positively related to increases in vocabulary size and language development. Magnetic resonance imaging of children engaged in conversational turn-taking showed greater neural language processing over and above just the number of words they heard.

Drawing on this research, Neuman and her team developed a set of question prompts in the lesson plans that support this kind of active engagement throughout the story-reading.

“For example, the teacher might say, ‘Dogs and cats are a type of pet. What are the dog and cat? A type of pet, right! A pet needs water to survive. So, to survive, what’s one thing a dog needs? Right! A dog needs water to survive.’”

“You have to be listening in a conversation like that. With rapid conversational turns, I’m encouraging all the children to respond at the same time in an engaging way. It helps children practice that language. It’s especially good for the second-language learners because they’re not being singled out. We tell the teachers to pretend that the children are waiting for a train and the teacher has to do something quickly to get them engaged before they’re off. We work on rapid responses to keep the children in the conversation.”

In 2017, Neuman and her research team launched a study of more than 1,000 randomly selected children in pre-K through the first grade from the Bronx school district for a 21-week intervention employing this redesigned “soft script” curriculum. The results were enough to make any early-learning advocate smile.

“For one thing, we had 16 pages of testimonials from the teachers, saying how much they like this approach,” Neuman says. “We interviewed them after the study and they said they like it because it provides the opportunity for them to bring their own personality and views into the lesson. They also love that it’s content-driven and that the children are getting to know more about science.

“So many of our kids in the elementary grades never hear anything about science — and they love learning about the mysteries of space, about wild weather. Engaging the kids in these interesting topics is a way for them to feel smart — and these kids experience tremendous joy when they know they’re learning.

“One child came up to me — a kindergarten child — and said, ‘I’m in camouflage today. I’m in camouflage.’ Another sighed and said, ‘I am so fatigued today.’”

Vocabulary for the win!

The good news is that evidence exists, and the tool is readily available. The even better news for parents and caretakers? It’s free and simple: talk, listen and respond to children when they’re babies and toddlers. It’s all about the conversation.

has shown that the amount of interactive talk with adults that children experience in their first three years of life is directly related to their verbal abilities and IQ in adolescence. Researchers with LENA (Language Environment Analysis), a national nonprofit that helps communities accelerate language development in children birth to 3, began studying families in 2006 to observe the amount of adult words and back-and-forth conversations children were exposed to in their daily lives.

“For years, we’ve stressed the importance of what we call ‘conversational turns’ as one of the most predictive measures of child outcomes,” says Dr. Jill Gilkerson, LENA’s chief research and evaluation officer. “We were in a really unique position of having that early data and then being able to locate those kids in adolescence and have them participate in language and cognitive tests. Longitudinal studies are rare in this field and we now have long-term, empirical evidence of the benefits of early language exposure.”

For the original study, Gilkerson and her team enlisted more than 300 families with children 2 to 48 months old to participate in daylong LENA sessions for six months using a device that captured talk between the child and their caregivers. Often referred to as a “talk pedometer,” the LENA device doesn’t recognize individual words, but uses speech recognition algorithms that estimate word counts based on syllables, consonant distributions, duration and other characteristics.

The device weighs about two ounces and is small enough to slip into the pocket of a little vest the child wears. Parents were asked to turn the device on at the beginning of the day, leave it on and let it run out by itself. The information was then transferred to a cloud-processing system where the LENA software analyzed the captured audio and presented clear reports that are shared with parents and caregivers. The audio was deleted right after this processing so there’s never a record of what has been said.

Here’s how it works. The LENA algorithms are trained to identify and differentiate adult and child speech from TV, electronic media and background sounds. It automatically estimates the number of conversational turns between child and adult. The data show that those are the interactions that figure so dramatically in later outcomes: Children who experience more conversational turns as toddlers do measurably better academically and socially as adolescents.

“Conversational turns” refers to the back and forth talk between adult and child — even before the child has actual words. Gilkerson compares it to a verbal “serve and return” like ping pong. Gilkerson’s research and other important studies demonstrate that it isn’t the sheer number of words a child is exposed to but these conversational turns that make the difference in a child’s brain development and language learning. Torrents of words and human sounds wash over a baby from birth: it’s the social interaction that make those words stick — and make the language centers of the baby’s brain light up like a Christmas tree.

“The number of those conversational turns, especially at 18 to 24 months, has been shown to be the most predictive of child language development, as well as long-term cognitive outcomes and language outcomes,” she says. “They’re a measure of what the child is actually engaged in, not just passively listening to adult words, but their actual experience with language.”

The LENA technology offers a particularly hopeful solution to the documented “word gap” between children in lower socio-economic circumstances and middle- to higher-income families. The gap—which say amounts to a 30-million-word advantage by the time better-resourced children reach age 4 — does exist, but the LENA research proves that remedies can be available to every family.

Using the LENA analysis, researchers have been able to provide parents, caregivers and early childhood educators with rapid feedback about their verbal interactions.

“We’re able to show parents information about their LENA day compared to a normative sample,” Gilkerson says. “If it’s low, we can share techniques for improving those interactions, and when they make changes, they can see increases in the objective data, which can be very motivating. On the other side of it, it’s been great to be able to show some families what a wonderful job they’re already doing. Some of them are already really interacting with their children a lot — and it can be validating for them to be able to see that.

“It’s not necessarily the case that all high-income parents are talking a lot with their kids,” she says. “There’s a gigantic range within all socioeconomic groups. There’s a distribution (with more interaction at higher-income levels), but it’s important to know that we can change those trajectories through intervention. We can provide feedback and get those parents engaged.”

Particularly with lower-income parents who may be working multiple jobs and experience a great deal of pressure on their time and resources, Gilkerson and her team stress that incorporating conversational turns doesn’t have to be something “extra” to add to an already overburdened daily reality.

“For a parent who’s working long hours and experiencing a lot of challenges, it might not be top of mind for them to provide a language-rich environment for their child,” she says. “But if we can just educate them on the importance of talking with their child — even when they aren’t yet able to talk to you, it does make such a difference. Even just having a few minutes at the end of the day to sit and read a little. They don’t have to read a book from cover to cover — it’s all about having a conversation about the book. Let them interrupt, ask questions and talk, talk, talk with them. If a parent can do that daily, then they can really improve things for their child.”

LENA has developed comprehensive coaching curriculums that couple with the data from their technology to support parents, teachers and home visitors. The programs are implemented by trusted community partners like libraries, school districts and state agencies. is an evidence-based community program in which parents use LENA’s technology and meet for 10 weekly sessions (virtually or in person) to increase conversation with their young children. A facilitator introduces for talking with their children and the group discusses the tips, then goes home to try them and returns to discuss how the experience went. The program started in 2015 with two sites; it’s now up to 31 active sites, reaching more than 4,800 children.

In addition to being a great way for parents to learn the skills of incorporating quality talk into daily routines with their small children, it’s also a great way to build social capital in the community, she says.

launched in its current form in 2016 and has reached more than 4,700 children so far. The program supports home visitors who work one-on-one with families to increase their focus on talk and positive adult-child interactions. Other LENA tools are also available for speech pathologists, researchers and others who need scientifically reliable speech-language measurements for babies and young children.

, started in 2017, is a research-based professional development program for infant, toddler and pre-K teachers that couples LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology with strengths-based coaching that doesn’t pile more onto their schedules. It is currently operating in 162 centers and has reached more than 9,700 children since its inception.

“I’m most excited about LENA Grow,” Gilkerson says. “If we really want to move the needle and have a large, population-level effect, we want to train the people who will be interacting with a lot of children.

“I’ve been so encouraged by the fact that teachers really love this data. A lot of people in this field are not given ongoing opportunities for growth and professional development. Having someone acknowledge the importance of their work and being provided with a tool that can give them feedback can be very elevating for them. Most of them are attracted to the field because they love being able to help the children in their care.

“There are so many children who spend more than half of their waking hours in childcare or preschool at a time when their little brains are growing so quickly. Think of how many children a childcare professional can impact over their lifetime.”

Organizations globally are now using LENA programs to enrich their communities’ language environments for children and to build early literacy skills, strengthen families and increase school readiness. This offers details.

Think how many children in the world these programs can affect and how many verbally adept, intelligent, socially engaged adolescents — soon to be adults — that translates into. Just think.

“Conversation is not necessarily about having a rich verbal language,” says early learning scholar and author Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. “At first, conversation can be coos and gestures and funny noises. A baby’s language learning is about the connection, the back and forth communication that happens way before words. It’s like a duet: babies learn language through interaction. It’s never too early to start because they are always listening — even in the womb.”

A landmark study in 1995 reported on the “30-million-word gap” that divides higher income children from those in lower income families. The gap refers to the number of words spoken to children’s ears by the adults in their lives. The size of the gap correlates with significant differences in vocabulary, language development and reading comprehension. Since that revelation, some educators and parents have pushed hard to have babies start learning words — lots of words — as early as possible.

This creates what both Hirsh-Pasek and her long-time collaborator Dr. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff describe as a “flash-card” approach to language, which emphasizes the words themselves rather than the interactions that are the true delivery mechanism of language. This way of presenting isolated words without context is like dumping words on the baby and hoping some stick. The process resembles how some of us studied for the SAT, but how many of those words do we remember now?

Before they can learn vocabulary, the scholars say, babies have to learn to isolate or segment words from the stream of sounds that surround them. They do this in a variety of brilliant ways, from sorting out statistical cues connected with how frequently they hear a word to the stress patterns in the words swirling around them. “Juice? You want some juice?” By 6 months, babies recognize a novel word that follows their own name, but not a novel word after someone else’s name. Research shows that long before a child can produce words, they have stored the frequently heard word forms in their brilliant , ready for use when their vocal mechanism has developed enough to shape words.

At 24 months, the variability in babies’ vocabularies is breathtaking, ranging from 56 to 520 words, and these enormous differences, the scholars say, are rooted in both the verbal and nonverbal gestural interactions that take place between babies and their caregivers. The more of these back-and-forth interactions mothers and other caregivers have with their babies, the greater the child’s school-ready vocabulary by the time they’re off to kindergarten at 4½ or 5.

“The beautiful thing about that is that it doesn’t take anything fancy,” Hirsh-Pasek says. “It’s free. You don’t have to buy anything to have these kinds of conversations with your child. Babies learn words like spiders spin webs — it happens entirely naturally.

“But what you do need is be mindful of paying attention to your child. Because when you’re looking down at your cell phone and are locked into that, you ignore your child’s cues and questions and it breaks up the natural flow of conversation.”

Scientists refer to those back and forth interactions that start even before the baby can say a single word as “conversational turns” and studies show that the more conversational turns children experience, the greater the activation of a major language-processing area of the brain (Broca’s area), regardless of the child’s economic status or even the number of adult words they hear.

“What you’re going for isn’t just ‘volley and return,’” Hirsh-Pasek says. “It’s more like volley and return and return and return — responding to the child then responding to their response. One of my colleagues says you should ‘strive for five’ turns in the conversation.”

One of the most effective ways to engage in this back and forth, the experts say, is through the challenging quality of “wh-questions.” Like any good reporter, parents and caregivers need to master the fine art of “Who, what, when, where, how and why.”

Children respond more frequently and in more complex ways to wh-questions than to any other, Hirsh-Pasek says. “Start by looking where the child is looking,” she says. “Then, ask them about that — not one of those ‘close-ended’ questions that can only be answered with yes or no. You want the questions that encourage and build conversations (‘What is that?’ ‘I wonder what the doggies are saying?’), not the conversation crushers.”

Children who hear a lot of these questions that challenge their thinking are generally better able to understand and produce them as well. While harried parents might not always think the incessant “Why, why, why” of a toddler is a great thing, in the long run, those questions and the interactions they elicit can lead to richer vocabularies and concepts about the world.

Research shows that middle-class parents pose more questions to their children, on average, than parents from less resourced environments. However, there are many differences within families in both groups.  Further, fathers on average pose more wh-questions than mothers do. Toddlers in under-resourced environments are exposed to less verbal input than their middle-income peers, but since fathers across socioeconomic groups ask more of these “clarification” questions, researchers say they may play a unique role in supporting their children’s language and cognitive development. In one important study, African American fathers posed the most wh-questions of any of the groups regardless of income status.

The big bonus, scientists say, comes later in a child’s life when these challenging social interactions boost the complexity of their thinking and their verbal reasoning skills.

To develop a vocabulary, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek say, children need to hear words embedded in sentences, and they need to hear different word types. They talk about this as the “architecture of language,” in which a child learns nouns as an entry point because they label concrete items, then moves on to verbs like “run” and “spatial-relational terms” — e.g., “bring the ball over here.”

When parents and caregivers take cues from the child and play off what the child finds interesting, vocabulary comes alive. When a child says, “What’s that?” they aren’t asking simply to be told, “That’s a toaster.” They are asking for information on what the item is used for. Children need clear information about word meaning, Golinkoff says. To really know a word, the child has to have at least a minimal grasp of how that word might be used in different ways. They are hungry for context. “That’s a toaster. We use it to cook our bread sometimes, don’t we? It gets very hot. What else gets very hot?”

Though stacks of research make it abundantly clear that such natural interaction and playful learning serve as the platform for vocabulary learning, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek say that the educational system is increasingly moving in the opposite direction, more toward the flashcards paradigm than playful interaction. Children can eventually learn definitions, they say, but passive memorization will never yield the depth and retention needed for a child to actually master vocabulary and the logical thought processes that turn language into the keys to the kingdom. How a child learns is as important as what they learn and what ultimately will make vocabulary stick is the playful conversational concepts they learned, starting in the crib.

It all begins with a coo.