Digital vs. Hard Copy? A Preliminary Study of Reading Style in Children Using Touch Screen and Paper Books
Abstract
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. 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.Citation
Uther M., Ross K., Randell J., Pye R. (2019) Digital vs. Hard Copy? A Preliminary Study of Reading Style in Children Using Touch Screen and Paper Books. In: Marcus A., Wang W. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability. Application Domains. HCII 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11585. Springer, ChamPublisher
Springer International PublishingJournal
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)Additional Links
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-23538-3_38Type
Conference contributionLanguage
enSeries/Report no.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11585ISSN
0302-9743EISSN
1611-3349ISBN
9783030235376ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1007/978-3-030-23538-3_38
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