How Parents Engage Children in Tablet - Based Reading Experiences : An Exploration of Haptic Feedback

While recent work examines parents and children reading together on tablet computers, the ways in which interactive elements within e-books affect parent-child interaction are not well understood. We examine haptic feedback as a new form of e-book interactivity and analyze how parents and children exploit this dimension when reading together. Results from a laboratory study with 18 parent-child dyads (N=36) reveal that participants reading a haptic e-book talked more about the technology compared to those reading a regular e-book, and this additional talk was a way in which parents elaborated the story narrative. Parents reading a nonhaptic e-book, however, engaged in higher rates of expressive behavior (e.g., making sounds, gestures). This suggests that haptic interactivity provides a new resource for parents to draw out the story narrative but may also result in less parent expressivity when reading, both of which have implications for child comprehension and literacy. Author