Media exposure and preschoolers' social-cognitive development

Abstract

Exposure to narratives may have beneficial effects on children's social-cognitive development because narratives provide information about the social world and often require social understanding for story comprehension. In the current study, we examined the influence of narratives presented via different media (books, audiobooks, TV/films) on theory-of-mind performance and mental verb comprehension in a sample of 114 three- to six-year-old preschool children. Parents' reports on the number of (children's) books at home, the overall duration of TV/film and audio media exposure, the frequency of shared book reading, watching children's TV/films and audiobook listening, and parent–child discussions about media content were collected. Children's theory-of-mind performance and mental verb comprehension were measured as dependent variables. When gender, age, language skills and parental education were controlled, only the number of children's books, shared book reading frequency, audio-media exposure and audiobook usage significantly predicted children's theory-of-mind scores. None of the media exposure or the parent–child discussion variables had significant incremental effects above the family and child characteristics on mental verb comprehension.