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The present article provides an overview of the best-selling apps for the age range of 0-8 years under various categories, including 'Kids', 'Books', 'Educational games', 'Family games' and 'Word games' in the two major application stores (Google Play and iTunes App Store) in four economically diverse European countries: Hungary, Turkey, Greece and the Netherlands. As tablets seem to be a substantial part of children's leisure activities, and thus apps might play an important role in their development, we conducted a content analysis to highlight two issues: the educational value of the most popular children's apps and the fine-tuning of apps to the local culture and language of non-English speaking countries. There is a large overlap between the best-selling apps in the four countries; in fact, half of the apps appear among the most popular lists in more than one country. Consequently, most children's apps do not include any oral language and, if they do, they are not available in the local language. Furthermore, the results show that a substantial part of the apps supported early literacy skills. In the majority of apps teaching literacy, although advertised for the youngest, the focus of instruction was more suited for school-age children.

The major purpose of this study was to test how preliterate learners use illustrations in storybooks to understand a story. Subjects were 23 five-year-old low-SES children, learning Dutch as a second language. Each child was exposed four times to a digital picture storybook. Five books were used and counterbalanced over children and repetitions. During book exposure, eye movements were registered using a remote eye-tracking system. To test whether eye fixations matched the text we scored how often and how long children fixated visual elements in the illustrations that the story text highlighted. We also scored how often human and non-human objects were fixated. In line with the hypothesis that eye fixations are time locked to referential expressions in the text, visual elements that the text highlighted were fixated more often and longer than elements in illustrations not highlighted in the story text. We also found evidence that, at times, inspection of illustrations followed an autonomous pattern. We discuss how both types of visual behaviour can add to vocabulary development and story comprehension. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)