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A meta-analysis was conducted on the effects of technology-enhanced stories for young children's literacy development when compared to listening to stories in more traditional settings like storybook reading. A small but significant additional benefit of technology was found for story comprehension (g+ = 0.17) and expressive vocabulary (g+ = 0.20), based on data from 2,147 children in 43 studies. When investigating the different characteristics of technology-enhanced stories, multimedia features like animated pictures, music, and sound effects were found beneficial. In contrast, interactive elements like hotspots, games, and dictionaries were found to be distracting. Especially for children disadvantaged because of less stimulating family environments, multimedia features were helpful and interactive features were detrimental. Findings are discussed from the perspective of cognitive processing theories.

Children showing poor executive functioning may not fully benefit from learning experiences at home and school and may lag behind in literacy skills. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 276 kindergarten children. Executive functions and literacy skills were tested at about 61?months and again a year later. In line with earlier studies, correlations between both skills were significant at age 5?years, but the predictive value of executive functions on alphabetic skills weakened or disappeared 1?year later. Assuming that executive functions are in development at this age and change has to be taken into account, we applied fixed effects analyses (FEAs) to repeated measures of alphabetic skills and executive functions. FEAs demonstrated that changes in children's alphabetic skills concur with changes in executive functions, thus strengthening inferences about a causal relationship. Executive functions are unstable in the early stages of cognitive development and one-time measures cannot predict their impact on reading 1?year later. Consequences of this new insight are discussed.

Not all young children benefit from book exposure in preschool age. It is claimed that the ability to hold information in mind ("short-term memory"), to ignore distraction ("inhibition"), and to focus attention and stay focused ("sustained attention") may have a moderating effect on children's reactions to the home literacy environment. In a group of 228 junior kindergarten children with a native Dutch background, with a mean age of 54.29 months (SD = 2.12 months), we explored therefore the relationship between book exposure, cognitive control and early literacy skills. Parents filled in a HLE questionnaire (book sharing frequency and an author recognition checklist as indicator of parental leisure reading habits), and children completed several tests in individual sessions with the researcher (a book-cover recognition test, PPVT, letter knowledge test, the subtests categories and patterns of the SON, and cognitive control measures namely digit span of the KABC, a peg tapping task and sustained attention of the ANT). Main findings were: (1) Children's storybook knowledge mediated the relationship between home literacy environment and literacy skills. (2) Both vocabulary and letter knowledge were predicted by book exposure. (3) Short-term memory predicted vocabulary over and above book exposure. (4) None of the cognitive control mechanisms moderated the beneficial effects of book exposure. (Contains 4 tables.)

Book reading has been demonstrated to promote vocabulary. The current study was conducted to examine the added value of an interactive shared book reading format that emphasizes active as opposed to noninteractive participation by the child. Studies that included a dialogic reading intervention group and a reading-as-usual control group, and that reported vocabulary as an outcome measure were located. After extracting relevant data from 16 eligible studies, a meta-analysis was conducted to attain an overall mean effect size reflecting the success of dialogic reading in increasing children's vocabulary compared to typical shared reading. When focusing on measures of expressive vocabulary in particular (k = 9, n = 322), Cohen's d was 0.59 (SE = 0.08; 95% CI = 0.44, 0.75; p less than 0.001), which is a moderate effect size. However, the effect size reduced substantially when children were older (4 to 5 years old) or when they were at risk for language and literacy impairments. Dialogic reading can change the home literacy activities of families with 2- to 3-year-old children but not those of families with children at greatest risk for school failure. (Contains 3 tables.)

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 bestselling 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories presented on phones, tablets and e-readers now offer an alternative to print books. The fundamental challenge has become to specify when and for whom the manner in which children retain information from stories has been changed by electronic storybooks, for better and for worse. We review the effects of digitized presentations of narratives that include oral text as well as multimedia information sources (e.g., animations and other visual and sound effects, background music, hotspots, games, dictionaries) on children's emergent literacy. Research on preschool and kindergarten children has revealed both positive and negative effects of electronic stories conditional upon whether materials are consistent with the way that the human information processing system works. Adding certain information to electronic storybooks can facilitate multimedia learning , especially in children at-risk for language or reading difficulty. Animated pictures, sometimes enriched with music and sound, that match the simultaneously presented story text, can help integrate nonverbal information and language and thus promote storage of those in memory. On the other hand, stories enhanced with hypermedia interactive features like games and “hotspots” may lead to poor performance on tests of vocabulary and story comprehension. Using those features necessitates task switching, and like multitasking in general, seems to cause cognitive overload . However, in accordance with differential susceptibility theory, well-designed technology-enhanced books may be particularly suited to improve learning conditions for vulnerable children and turn putative risk groups into successful learners. This new line of research may have far-reaching consequences for the use of technology-enhanced materials in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a randomized control trial, the authors tested whether short- and long-term effects of an early literacy intervention are moderated by mild perinatal adversities in accordance with differential susceptibility theory. One-hundred 5-year-old children (58% male) who scored at or below the 30th percentile on early literacy measures were randomized to a Web-based remedial early literacy program Living Letters or a treated control group. Parents gave written informed consent to access the perinatal data of their children at the Perinatal Register in the Netherlands. Twenty-one children were, at birth, small for gestational age (between the 2.5th and 10th percentiles) or late preterm (between 34 and 37 weeks, 6 days). In this group with mild perinatal adversities, intervention children outperformed the control group immediately after the intervention and after 8 months of formal reading instruction, but a similar effect of the computerized literacy program in children without mild perinatal adversities was absent. In line with the theory of differential susceptibility, children with mild perinatal adversities seem to be more open to environmental input, for better and for worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research synthesis examines whether the association between print exposure and components of reading grows stronger across development. We meta-analyzed 99 studies (N 7,669) that focused on leisure time reading of (a) preschoolers and kindergartners, (b) children attending Grades 1-12, and (c) college and university students. For all measures in the outcome domains of reading comprehension and technical reading and spelling, moderate to strong correlations with print exposure were found. The outcomes support an upward spiral of causality: Children who are more proficient in comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills read more; because of more print exposure, their comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills improved more with each year of education. For example, in preschool and kindergarten print exposure explained 12% of the variance in oral language skills, in primary school 13%, in middle school 19%, in high school 30%, and in college and university 34%. Moderate associations of print exposure with academic achievement indicate that frequent readers are more successful students. Interestingly, poor readers also appear to benefit from independent leisure time reading. We conclude that shared book reading to preconventional readers may be part of a continuum of out-of-school reading experiences that facilitate children's language, reading, and spelling achievement throughout their development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on the ability of book-based animated stories, when well designed and produced, to have positive effects on young viewers' narrative comprehension and language skills. Sixty 5-year-olds, learning Dutch as a 2nd language, were randomly assigned to 4 experimental and 2 control conditions. The children profited to some extent from repeated encounters with a storybook with static pictures but more from repeated encounters with the animated form of the story. Both story formats were presented on a computer screen; both included the same oral text spoken in the same voice but the animated story was supplemented with multimedia features (video, sounds, and music) dramatizing the events. Multimedia additions were especially effective for gaining knowledge of implied elements of stories that refer to goals or motives of main characters, and in expanding vocabulary and syntax. The added value of multimedia books was strengthened over sessions. In a group from families with low educational levels who were lagging in language and literacy skills, multimedia storybooks seem to provide a framework for understanding stories and remembering linguistic information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]