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Increasingly, children are engaging in early literacy experiences through digital devices. This raises questions about how electronic reading compares to print reading. To assess this, we randomly assigned 200 children (3–5 years) to be read the same book (1) with auto-narration on a tablet or 2) by a researcher from a print book. Reading was recorded and coded for behavioral and emotional engagement and vocalizations. Children were also tested on their story comprehension and vocabulary. Children had slightly higher posttest scores in the print condition. Older children and females also scored higher. There was an interaction between weekly tablet use and book platform. Children were equally engaged with the e-book and print book, but vocalized more about the device in the e-book condition. Findings suggest that e-books offer many of the same, but not all, of the educational affordance as print books. Additionally, novelty might be important in supporting comprehension.

Joint book reading is a highly routinized activity that is nearly universal among families. Conversational agents (CAs) can potentially act as joint-reading partners by engaging children in story-related, scaffolded conversations. In this project, we develop a CA reading partner that incorporates components of effective conversational guidance (i.e., questions to stimulate thinking, specific feedback, and adaptive scaffolding) and examine children's interactions with this CA. We identify patterns in children's language production, flow maintenance, and affect when responding to the CA. We then lay out a set of affordances and challenges for developing CAs as conversation partners. We propose that, rather than attempting to develop CAs as an exact replicate of human conversational partners, we should treat child-agent interaction as a new genre of conversation and calibrate CAs based on children's actual communicative practices and needs.

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