What was measured? The researchers were interested in learning performance as well as many facets of behavior during the parent-child reading phase. Learning performance was measured by testing if children would be able to correctly identify unfamiliar animals that they had been exposed to through the book. In addition, a range of behavioral variables was observed during the reading phase such as how the child paid attention to the book, their availability for reading, positive emotions, participation in page turning, and production of content-related utterances. Furthermore, parent’s behavior during the reading phase was assessed, too, to check whether parents would behave differently while reading an e-book versus a print book.

Study findings

Before diving into the results, let’s quickly take a look at the authors’ predictions. Based on previous findings, they expected that children in the e-book condition would state fewer content-related comments and engage in less pointing behaviour than children in the print book condition. However, they predicted that children being read an e-book would display more attention, be more engaged, and show more positive emotions towards the medium. Finally, they expected children in the e-book condition to show lower performance in the animal identification test.

Parents and children behavior during the reading phase

Duration: It turned out that parents spent more time reading to their children from the e-book than from the printed book. Therefore, in all later analyses, the researchers later control for this factor, but it is something to keep in mind.

Parent behavior: Parents showed more pointing behavior and read more text in the print book condition than in the e-book condition. The latter finding is to be expected because the e-books featured automatic voiceover. Other than that, parents’ behavior did not differ between the two conditions.