Flip a card, say “dog”, and a two-year-old points happily at the dog. Do it with a new card, zebra, and they point at that too. It looks like learning at the speed of the deck.
Some of it is. But research on how toddlers learn words says the moment a child picks the right picture and the moment they have learned the word are further apart than they look. Flashcards can work. How you use them decides whether they do.
Picking the right card is not the same as knowing the word
Jessica Horst and Larissa Samuelson tested this with 24-month-olds (Infancy, 2008). The children were shown a few objects, some familiar and one new, and asked for one by a made-up name. They were excellent at it. Faced with a ball, a cup and something they had never seen, they worked out that the strange word went with the strange thing.
Five minutes later, tested on the same names, they mostly could not do it again. The quick matching had happened; the remembering had not. Retention improved only when the experimenters also named the object outright after the child picked it.
For flashcards, that means a toddler pointing at the right card on the first go tells you very little. The question is whether they can do it again later, after something else has happened.
Spread out beats all at once
Haley Vlach, Catherine Sandhofer and Nate Kornell (Cognition, 2008) showed three-year-olds examples of a new kind of object, with a name. Some children saw the examples back to back; others saw them with about thirty seconds of play in between. The children who had the breaks were better at applying the name to new objects of the same kind.
Thirty seconds is very short, and the effect still showed. This is the spacing effect, one of the most reliable findings in memory research, turning up in children too young to know what a lesson is. A small forgetting between meetings is not a failure; it is what makes the next meeting count.
Sleep does part of the work
Williams and Horst (Frontiers in Psychology, 2014) read three-year-olds storybooks with new words in them. Children who napped soon after remembered more of the words than children who stayed awake, and the advantage was still there a week later.
So a few words in the morning, revisited after the afternoon nap and again the next day, are working with the child’s memory rather than against it.
What about baby videos and “your baby can read”?
Judy DeLoache and colleagues (Psychological Science, 2010) gave families with 12- to 18-month-olds a best-selling vocabulary DVD to watch several times a week for a month. The children learned no more of its words than children who never saw it. The group that learned most had no video at all: their parents simply tried to teach the same words in everyday life. Parents who liked the DVD also tended to overestimate what their child had learned from it.
That is not an argument against every screen, but it is a warning about passive watching, and about judging progress by how engaged a child looks.
How to use flashcards so the words stay
- Few at a time. Three or four words in a sitting, not a stack of thirty. The deck should end while your child still wants more.
- Ask, do not just show. “Where’s the dog?” with two or three cards out makes the child find the word in memory. Flipping cards past them does not.
- Name it again after they pick. Right or wrong, say the word once more: “Yes, the dog.” That was the step that rescued retention in the Horst and Samuelson study.
- Mix old and new. Most of a session should be words met before, with one new one. Yesterday’s words are the ones still in the balance.
- Come back after a gap. Later the same day, after a sleep, then a few days on. Words your child gets right can wait longer; words they miss come back sooner.
- Make the wrong card informative. Early on, put the target next to very different pictures — dog with a car and an apple. Later, with similar ones — dog with a cat — so the child has to know the word, not just tell animals from fruit.
- Take it off the card. When you see a real dog, say “dog”. A word that turns up in the park and on the card is a word that sticks.
Notice that most of this is about when and in what order, not about the cards themselves. That is the part that is hard to keep track of by hand, especially once a child knows fifty words and you can no longer remember which ones were wobbly last Tuesday.
What I am building for this
VocabPeek Junior is an iPhone and iPad app that does the scheduling part. A widget on the Home Screen says a word and your child taps the right picture out of three, three words a round. Each word comes back on a widening schedule — a few hours, a day, three days, a week — and a miss brings it back sooner. Pictures the child confuses are put side by side until they can tell them apart, and a word they may already know is asked before it is taught, so it is not taught again.
There is nothing for the child to read, no account and no ads. It is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, free for now.
Short answers
Do flashcards work for toddlers? They can, if they are used to ask for words rather than show them, a few at a time, and revisited over days.
At what age can a child learn from flashcards? The studies above worked with children from about two. Younger than that, everyday talk and real objects do far more.
How many flashcards a day for a two-year-old? A handful of words in short sittings, mostly review, with one or two new ones.
Why does my toddler forget words they knew yesterday? Because one meeting is rarely enough at that age. Bring the word back after a gap; forgetting a little first is part of how it sticks.