Living Books: The Incidental Bonus of Playing with Multimedia

The story-telling multimedia, Living Book, is one of the most
common edutainment genres, in which children hear and play
with interactive and animated stories, in a highly-engaging
multimedia environment. Living Books are designed so that
that every word of the story is projected as text on the computer monitor simultaneously with its narration. This enables
listeners to synchronize between the audio and textual representation of words and thus to learn their pronunciation and
understand their meaning. This article presents results of a
study which showed that young children who did not know
how to speak or read the English language became profi cient
in pronunciation and gained a high level of understanding by
playing with Living Books. Results show that the participants
were able to correctly pronounce almost 70% of the words
in the Living Book and could identify the meaning of about
70% of them. On the other hand, it was found that they were
able to read words as orthographic units but not to identify
individual letters (average of 6.25%). Our fi ndings point to
the potential for incidental learning in highly-interactive, engaging and playful multimedia environments, such as Living
Books.