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Cartoon Sound Effects
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Does your child like the "funny noises" that are added to children's programs? These noises may have increased your child's comprehension of the video. We learned from a prior study that doubling exposure to the video demonstration for the rattle toy increased 12- and 15-month-olds' ability to imitate from television. Babies, however, were not able to imitate the actions for the puppet game from a video demonstration even when exposure time was doubled. In this study we added sound effects to the puppet video demonstration. Imitation by both age groups of a puppet toy increased when sound effects were added.
Click here for PDF file of The influence of electronic sound effects on learning from televised and live models.
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Question
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How does adding matching or mismatching sound effects to a video display affect imitation from television in 6- to 18-month-olds?
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What did we do?
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We first showed 6- and 12- and 18-month-olds a video demonstration that repeated our puppet game six times either with matching or mismatching sound effects. The demonstrations showed a three-step action of the puppet game. In the video demonstration with sound effects, a cartoon sound effect was paired with each target action. For the mismatching condition it was deliberately mismatched to the target action.
We were able to see if the baby would imitate the actions originally demonstrated by presenting the real puppet. We showed one-year-olds the real puppet toy the same day and showed 15-month-olds the puppet toy the next day. Babies in the control group were simply shown the puppet without ever seeing the video. We compared the groups shown the video with and without sound effects to the group shown the actions demonstrated by a real person. If babies who saw video or live demonstrations performed more actions than did the control group, we could say that they imitated.
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What did we find?
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We found that 6-, 12-, and 18-month-olds in the matching sound effects group imitated from television but only 6-month-olds in the mismatched condition did so. We conclude, that the features of television such as sound effects and their meaning take time and exposure for babies to learn. Once again, these findings emphasize that processing information from television during infancy is a cognitively challenging task.
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Conclusions
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Television producers should be aware that certain aspects of television, such as sound effects matched with actions are learned but that mismatching of information interferes with learning.
By noticing how babies pick up different amounts of information from various demonstrations of the same task, television producers and parents can take advantage of different strategies that tailor teaching to each task.
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Future Directions
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We are now examining the role of background music plays on learning from television.
We would like to extend our thanks to all parents and babies who have participated. Without your generosity, there would be no findings. If you are interested in learning more about our studies, please contact us and we will be sure to get back to you. We are always looking for new participants to be involved and for current participants to be involved again.
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Published Findings
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Click here for PDF file of The influence of electronic sound effects on learning from
televised and live models.
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Back to findings
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