One of the most important benefits of read alouds in the early years is the exposure children gain to new words. Although many early skills support later reading success, early vocabulary knowledge improves reading in several ways, including supporting comprehension of words that children decode; helping children recognize words more quickly; fostering phonological awareness skills; and increasing children’s understanding of content-area instruction. However, the nature of interactive read alouds in young children’s homes is evolving, as families are increasingly turning to digital texts from a very young age. This phenomenon, coupled with the indisputable benefits of children reading print books, necessitates a critical need to identify the affordances of digital texts for young children’s vocabulary development. To that end, the purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine one type of preschool digital text – interactive storybook apps – for the affordances they may provide for young children’s vocabulary development. Specifically, my study seeks to understand (a) the degree to which preschool storybook apps introduce new vocabulary words to young children; (b) the types of words children can learn from these texts; (c) the degree to which interactive features in storybook apps highlight new words; and (d) to what extent interactive features closely aligned to the words in the story might promote caregivers’ word-related talk while reading aloud. To answer these questions, I designed two separate but related studies. In the first study, I conducted a content analysis of 70 best-selling preschool storybook apps from three popular app stores: the Apple Store, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store. Using the Words Worth Teaching List as a guide, I analyzed 26,744 total words from these 70 apps to determine what percentage of words might be considered new for preschool-aged children. Furthermore, I described the types of words children might learn from these texts using three word-level features: parts of speech, frequency, and word difficulty. Finally, I determined to what extent new words in storybook apps are highlighted by interactive features. In the second study, I conducted an observational study of 37 caregivers of four- and five-year-old children to determine how interactive features closely aligned to new words in storybook apps might promote more word-related talk during read aloud of these texts. During this study, caregivers read four stories each – two print books and two storybook apps in counterbalanced order – for a total of 68,635 words in 148 sessions, totaling over 2,220 minutes of read aloud time. Findings from this study suggest that preschool storybook apps are ripe with opportunities to learn new words. The sample apps contained a total of 1,376 new words – for an average of nearly 20 words per story. Furthermore, storybook apps highlight approximately 23 percent of new words with interactive features, such as providing examples of a word (18.2 percent); demonstrating the meaning of a word (29.2 percent); or saying the word out loud when a reader taps on a picture of it (35.1 percent). Notably, caregivers talked about significantly more new words with their children when they were highlighted by these interactive features. However, I found that the number of interactive features per word, the types of interactive features in the text, and whether caregivers had engage with the word on the screen (i.e., tap on the screen to activate the interactive features) did not significantly influence whether and how caregivers talked about a new word in the text. This study contributes to the field’s understanding of preschool digital texts and their affordances for young children’s vocabulary development, as well as how caregivers use these texts during read alouds in the home environment. The findings from this study have implications for teacher professional development, teacher preparation, community-based outreach programs, and storybook app developers.
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