Smartphone use affects childrens speech development

By Crystal Simmons 22/08/2026 3 min read 21 views

Education and psychology experts warn that too much smartphone screen time is delaying kids’ language, but it’s not necessarily the children’s screen time that’s the problem. Researchers from the University of Oslo, Norway’s Department of Special Needs Education, say that kids whose parents spend more time on their smartphones have smaller vocabularies than their classmates.

In a research article published August 17th, 2026, in JAMA Pediatrics, the team report a negative correlation between parental smartphone use and their children’s language development. The academics followed 747 kids from 5 years old until they were seven to see how screen time affected their language development.

Kids need to practise talking and chatting with their caregivers to learn how to express themselves. The first five years of kids’ lives have a profound impact on their speech and language development; it’s the period when their brains are most neuroplastic. As we get older, the parts of our brain that handle speech and language get less adaptable and it gets more difficult to master new words and new grammatical patterns.

A child’s ability to communicate has a profound effect on their life. Researchers as far back as 2002 tracked kids with language delay to see how they did through school. They followed children who showed delayed language at 5 years old until they were 19, examining their educational records.

The special needs education researchers weren’t convinced by existing studies that have investigated the links between time kids spend looking at screens and language development. While some researchers are adamant that digital media exposure has long-term effects on children’s language development, in reality it’s not clear cut at all.

The scientists, led by Junyi Yang, PhD., realized that if they wanted to understand what was going on with language delays and smartphone screen time, they were going to have to track kids over time. This would help them follow whether parental screen time and children’s own smartphone use improved or delayed children’s language development.

They designed an experiment that would compare the vocabulary and grammar of kids at age 5 and then again at age 7, to assess what had changed. Then they would look to see how screen time affected those differences. Would parental screen time correlate to children’s language delays? How would a child’s screen time affect their scores?

They used household income, parental education, birth order, etc. to help them make very close comparisons, when it came to looking for relationships between smartphone screen time and language development. Many factors influence how a child develops. When researchers investigate whether something new has an effect, they have to consider it as part of a bigger picture.

The time primary parents spent on their smartphones had a measurable effect on kids’ vocabulary. For every additional hour a parent spent on their phone, kids showed a 0.42 lower increase in vocabulary scores than their peers. The researchers estimated that parental screen time contributed to a statistically significant 4.5% of the variance in scores between children.

Kids who owned a device scored an average of 5.1 points lower on vocabulary and 4.6 points lower on grammar tests than their peers who had no devices. This tells us that the issue here is probably about how they use their devices rather than how much time they spend on them.

Perhaps the kids who had to go through mum and dad to get their screen time were more likely to be discussing what they were watching or playing or doing. Similarly, the more time a parent expends looking at their phone, the slower a child’s language development is. It is because that parent is spending less time interacting with their child.

While the study doesn’t provide definitive answers, it suggests that parents should be mindful of their own screen time and its potential impact on their children’s language development. As the researchers note, talking to your kids is essential for their language development, and excessive screen time can hinder this process.