Synchronous reading in real-time environments

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. Living Books are designed so that that every word of the narrated story is projected on the computer monitor as it is narrated. This enables listeners to integrate between the audio and textual representation of words and thus to understand their meaning and learn their pronunciation. The present paper presents results of a study which showed that young children who did not know how to speak or read the English language became proficient 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 findings point to the potential for incidental learning in highlyinteractive, engaging and playful multimedia environments, such as Living Books.