What Babies, Infants, and Toddlers Hear on Fox/Disney BabyTV: An Exploratory Study

Sound and music are integral components of screen content. Yet, little research has been undertaken exploring soundscapes of infant-directed broadcasts. The current study implements a soundscape analysis of a representative corpus broadcast on Fox/Disney BabyTV for young children between the ages of 0 and 3 years; we considered both musical and linguistic constituents as structural components of the soundscape. The current study randomly selected 1 episode from each of the 39 series broadcast on the BabyTV channel; these were viewed 5 times (195 episodes, 682.5 min). Rater coding was based on 2 in-house developed measures: the Soundscape Appraisal of Broadcast Series and the Sulkin Infant Song Inventory. The results indicate that the sound and music constituents used attract young viewers to the screen but are developmentally inappropriate, as they do not facilitate young viewers engagement with the screen (singing and body movement). Moreover, as linguistic constituents are mostly nonintelligible utterances, not only might young viewers be hampered in recall of content, but they would not benefit from screen exposure toward developing more comprehensible speech and language. This article calls for the need of writers and producers of media screen content to design more suitable developmentally appropriate programs for baby-, infant-, and toddler-viewers. Public Policy Relevance Statement Sound and music are components of programs for young viewers that enhance child development. The current study analyzed the soundscape of 39 infant-directed TV broadcasted series from BabyTV. The results indicate that music and linguistic materials are developmentally inappropriate. The article discusses an urge for cooperation between media content creators and child development experts.