Researchers found that young children and their parents used fewer words and engaged in fewer conversations at home when the television was switched on.
A team from the Center for Child Health, Behaviour and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute in the US studied 329 infants aged two months to four years, recording sounds children were exposed to at home and the sounds and utterances they made over a period of two years.
Researchers used the recordings to measure adult word counts, child vocalisations and child conversational turns - when a child speaks and an adult responds to them, or vice versa, within five seconds.
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