Considering the influence of multimedia features in children’s digital books

Multimedia features in digital books have been mostly studied in relation to the presence of audio features, that is, sounds, music and spoken narrative. These are key distinguishing characteristics of digital books: digital books are different from print books because they have words that can be highlighted when spoken aloud by the recorded voice. Some digital books display the text passage and highlight in colour the individual words that are read aloud, and some digital books display the individual words one by one as they are being spoken aloud. This feature is an important teaching technique for children’s word recognition and letter knowledge, especially for children who struggle with recognising letters on the page. So much so that an early study by the Dutch researchers de Jong and Bus (2002) examining this feature in simple e-books found that digitally spoken text accompanied with corresponding written text that was highlighted as it was being spoken was for some children a more effective teaching tool than an adult reading from a print book with the child. The authors suggested that this might be because the digital format is more attractive to children in that the spoken words get highlighted in colour as soon as children tap the icon whereas words in print books are static and lack any special visual effects. De Jong and Bus concluded that ‘Exploration of electronic books is not a replacement for regular book-reading sessions but a valuable supplement’ (p. 154).

A key aspect of investigation by researchers has been whether the audio features of digital books are related to the storyline or not and how this alignment may influence children’s understanding of the story. This focus of research is important because there is a great variety in the current design of children’s popular digital books: some digital books contain music that interferes with the voiceover or distracts the child from the text, and some digital books have music to enhance the story plot. For example, in the Little Red Riding Hood digital book by Nosy Crow, there are pages that play calm background music (for example when Little Red Riding Hood is using a jar to get water from a pond) as well as simple sounds (for example when Little Red Riding Hood knocks on the door of Grandma’s house). Most researchers agree that audio features aligned with the storyline support children’s learning. For instance, researchers at the Bar-Ilan University found out that calming music played in the background of a digital book enhances children’s story comprehension (Shabat & Korat 2017).