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Media Release

May 17 2007

TV no substitute for a good book

Children who are exposed to lots of word-based stories at a young age appear to develop far more creative ideas about the future than children who experience mostly visual stories, a University of South Australia study shows.

Participants ranging in age from 15 to 80 years took part in the study, which looked at the impact of the stories that they heard, saw or read before the age of about 10 years.

Whether they were experienced through verbal family story telling, being read to or by reading for themselves, word-based stories had a different impact on young children than visual stories. Children who encountered a lot of word-based stories had more creative ideas about the type of career they might have, as well as a much greater fantasy life and more exotic ideas about how their lives might be lived, according to researcher Dr Julia de Roeper from the School of Communication.

“All except one of the people who had been read to as small children spontaneously said that the stories they liked at an early age made them feel happy. When asked what they had learnt from those stories, they talked about imagination, respect, acceptance, relationships and how to behave,” Dr de Roeper said.

“The children who had not experienced word-based stories through reading or being read to as young children, but had watched television instead, did not have the same breadth of imagination as the teenagers who encountered word-based stories,” Dr de Roeper said. “None of them felt they had learnt anything from their favourite stories, which were mostly television cartoons.”

Dr de Roeper’s findings are in accord with the comments of other researchers. Former Adelaide Thinker-in-Residence and neuroscientist Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield, in her 2003 book Tomorrow’s People, notes that books alone can foster and tap into our imagination, while a paper published by the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education in the journal Pediatrics (vol. 107, 2001) refers to research indicating that children exposed to “light screens” (televisions, computers, interactive games) do not build the sensory pathways that enable imagination and creativity in the same way as those whose early learning has been through the spoken and written word.

“For example, we don’t need to use our imagination to picture the fantasy character Yoda when watching the film Star Wars, but if we are told a story about a wise old person with pointy ears, we have to use our brain in order to build a mental picture. It seems that the exercise of hearing words and then having to turn those words into pictures helps children to extend and reinforce the neural network in their brains. I am keen to explore this area further with researchers working in the neurological field,” Dr de Roeper said.

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