Digital vs. Hard Copy? A Preliminary Study of Reading Style in Children Using Touch Screen and Paper Books

The use of touch screen storybooks for children allows reading to be transformed into an interactive multimedia experience, in which text is augmented by animations, sound effects, and games. The present study is a follow-up to an earlier study [1] which found that touch screen storybooks negatively affected child readers’ comprehension but resulted in more emotional engagement. Ross et al.’s earlier study used visual observations to determine the level of emotional engagement. The current study extends those findings to examine the acoustic and prosodic indices of speech whilst children are reading. It was hypothesized that if touch screens were more emotionally engaging, this may express itself in greater pitch variability in the read speech. Also, if reading were more task-focused, then this might express in more careful (and hence more disfluent) paper-based material. Very preliminary analysis on a small selection of speech samples from 5 participants aged 6–7 years in the Ross et al. [1] study show greater pitch range variability with paper-based storybooks as compared to touch-screen interactive versions. On the other hand, there appeared to be less variation in speech and articulation rate in the paper-based books compared to touch screen books. This was also coupled by a tendency for greater overall phonation rate and an increased speech and articulation rate in the paper-based condition, which may reflect a more fluid style for paper-based book reading. Discussion of these preliminary findings focuses on the future lines of enquiry and reflections on children’s reading style using different mediums.