Baby Einstein — the DVD and video line that turned its Centennial founder into a multimillionaire praised by President Bush — may hurt infants' language development, a study released this week has found.

A team of Seattle scientists determined that the over-use of such productions may slow vocabulary acquisition for infants eight to 16 months of age.

"We don't know for sure that baby DVDs and videos are harmful, but the best policy is safety first," Frank Zimmerman, lead author of the study and a University of Washington associate professor of health services, said in the prepared statement.

Julie Aigner-Clark, a former Denver-area teacher, founded Baby Einstein after her daughter was born. Searching for ways to share her love of art and music with her baby, she started by filming children's videos in her Centennial basement.

She grew her business to more than $20 million in sales in just five years, and sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company in 2001. Since then, Baby Einstein has become a $200 million business.

Aigner-Clark sat as a guest of honor with First Lady Laura Bush at President Bush's State of the Union address in January.

"Julie represents the great enterprising spirit of America," Bush said during his speech. He also praised her more recent work founding a video series that teaches children to make good choices in potentially dangerous situations.

The study found that, for every hour per day that infants watched baby videos and DVDs from such companies as "Baby Einstein" and "Brain Baby," they understood six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.

"The results surprised us, but they make sense," added Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of UW's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and a co-author of the study. "There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert. If the 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV instead of with people speaking in 'parentese' — that melodic speech we use with little ones — the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience."

The study is part of a larger project examining media viewing in the first two years of life. The researchers conducted random interviews with more than 1,000 families in Washington and Minnesota with a child under two years old.

Aigner-Clark could not immediately be reached for comment this morning.

She told The Denver Post this week that she was a little confounded and frustrated by the new research, which she thought envisioned someone letting their child watch the videos alone. She said the videos were intended to be watched by parents and children together, to promote interaction.

"You stay with the child and teach them," Aigner-Clark said. "...You are looking at the screen with the baby and saying, 'Look at the kitty cat.' It is really about being interactive."

The Baby Einstein Web site promotes the videos as a positive influence on infants: "Baby Einstein products are not designed to make babies smarter," it reads. "Rather, Baby Einstein products are specifically designed to engage babies and provide parents with tools to help expose their little ones to the world around them in playful and enriching ways — stimulating a baby's natural curiosity."

bargec@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5059