The interactive animated e-book as a word learning device for kindergartners

Electronic picture storybooks often include motion pictures, sounds, and background music instead of static pictures, and hotspots that label/define words when clicked on. The current study was designed to examine whether these additional elements aid word learning and story comprehension and whether effects accumulate making the animated e-book that also includes hotspots the most promising device. A sample group of 136 4and 5-year-old kindergarten children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: static e-books, animated e-books, interactive animated e-books, and a control group. In experimental conditions, four on-screen stories were each presented four times during a 4-week intervention period. Children in the control condition played nonliteracy related computer games during the same time. In all conditions, children worked independently with the computer programs. Strong treatment effects were found on target vocabulary originating from the story. Pupils gained most in vocabulary after reading interactive animated e-books, followed by (noninteractive) animated e-books and then static e-books. E-books including animations and interactivity were neither beneficial nor detrimental for story comprehension. Findings suggest that electronic storybooks are valuable additions in support of the classroom curriculum with interactive animated e-books being the best alternative. In a world in which media dominate our daily lives, young children spend much time with on-screen activities (i.e., watching television, playing computer games) at the expense of reading print books (Zeijl, Crone, Wiefferink, Keuzenkamp, & Reijneveld, 2005). The growing body of educational computer programs that has become available in the last decennium may be particularly promising for enriching young children’s language and literacy experiences (Marsh, 2009). Presenting stories through new media, such as computers, phones, tablets and e-readers, allows additional multimedia features that are not possible in print (Ito, 2009). Apart from an audio narration, electronic storybooks may include motion pictures, sounds, and background music, resulting in an animated presentation of the story. Electronic storybooks may also include interactive features (e.g., hotspots that © Cambridge University Press 2014 0142-7164/14 $15.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 2 Smeets & Bus: Interactive animated e-book as a word learning device activate an animation or a word meaning explanation). The current study was designed to examine whether both additional multimedia and interactive features benefit language skills and story comprehension and whether effects accumulate, thereby making the animated e-book enhanced with interactive features the best alternative. ANIMATED PRESENTATION OF THE STORY Storybooks for young children are lavishly illustrated; these detailed pictures make storybooks particularly suitable to extracting meanings and deriving unknown words from the book context. An eye-tracking study demonstrated that young children’s eye-gaze patterns are influenced by the summoning power of oral text processing: Children fixate more often and longer on details in illustrations that the text highlights than on elements that are not highlighted in the story text (Verhallen & Bus, 2011). According to the dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1986), advantages of presenting pictures and text simultaneously may result from stronger encoding when information is processed through both the visual and verbal channel instead of only one channel. In line with this view, children’s recall of the story improves when a narration is accompanied by illustrations (Hayes, Kelly, & Mandel, 1986; Greenfield & Beagles-Roos, 1988). Animated e-books can offer a media environment that optimizes temporal congruity of text and illustrations: built-in effects such as zooming or motion can guide children in selecting the details in the illustration where the narration refers to. For instance, in the e-book Tim op de Tegels (Pete on the Pavement; Veldkamp, 2004) the computer voice reads aloud that a truck driver wants to lift Pete off a pile of paving stones. The camera zooms in on Pete and the driver and, in synchrony with the narration, we see the driver reaching his arms toward Pete. This way, animated e-books may facilitate the learner’s understanding of the scene and of complex expressions like “lift off” (Schnotz & Rasch, 2005). When motion and zooming exactly match the story text children can make sense of pictures without much effort. Improving temporal proximity of text and images may help the child to select content for processing the story and may strengthen recalling and retaining the story language (Mayer, 2001). Nonverbal support for word learning may be especially important when children have limited vocabulary knowledge, because these children have fewer words with which to comprehend new words through verbal communication alone (Silverman & Hines, 2009). For that reason, the effectiveness of animated e-books has been studied in groups of second language (L2) learners (Silverman & Hines, 2009; Verhallen & Bus, 2010; Verhallen, Bus, & de Jong, 2006). Studies thus far have demonstrated that L2 students learned more words after they repeatedly heard e-books enriched with motion pictures, background music, and sound compared to electronic versions of the same stories with merely static pictures. Animated e-books were also effective for story understanding and particularly for making L2 children aware of goals, intentions, motivations, and feelings of story characters (Verhallen et al., 2006). By contrast, Silverman and Hines (2009) reported that a synergy of media was not superior for vocabulary growth in first language (L1) learners, concluding that static pictures may suffice to support learning new words Applied Psycholinguistics 3 Smeets & Bus: Interactive animated e-book as a word learning device when language skills are well developed. However, rather than comparing animated e-book with static e-book versions, Silverman and Hines used storybooks with embedded videos (i.e., they presented video clips apart from the storybook as an additional source of information). In the current study, the same storybooks are presented in either animated or static format to test whether animated e-book versions that optimize temporal congruity of text and illustrations aid both vocabulary acquisition and story comprehension in a normative group of L1 learners, as may be expected based on theories of (multimedia) learning (Mayer, 2001; Paivio, 1986).