Investigating the educational potential of touchscreen apps for children's early vocabulary acquisition

孩子们成长在一个日益数字化的时代，在家里、托儿所和学校都被数字媒体所包围。儿童的语言发展与他们在环境中听到的语言密切相关（Hart & Risley, 1995），研究表明，父母使用屏幕媒体会降低对孩子说语言的质量和数量（Christakis, Gilkerson, Richards, Zimmerman， Garrison等人，2009;Kirkorian, Pempek, Murphy, Schmidt, & Anderson, 2009; Pempek, Kirkorian, & Anderson, 2014; Radesky, Silverstein, Zuckerman, & Christakis, 2014）。与此同时，屏幕媒体有可能为幼儿提供宝贵的语言输入和教育娱乐来源。美国儿科学会（AAP）最近修订了他们对儿童屏幕媒体使用的建议，以考虑到这种教育潜力（AAP, 2016）。美国儿科学会鼓励2-5岁的儿童使用屏幕媒体，但他们的建议仅限于高质量的教育屏幕媒体，应该与父母和照顾者一起使用，每天使用时间不超过1小时（美国儿科学会，2016）。然而，问题仍然是，什么构成了幼儿的教育屏幕媒体？对于触屏应用，最近的一篇评论论文强调，促进积极、投入、有意义和社会互动学习的应用具有教育幼儿的潜力（Hirsh-Pasek, Zosh, Golinkoff, Gray, Robb & Kaufman, 2015）。虽然72%针对儿童的应用程序被归类为“教育”（Shuler, Levine & Ree, 2012），但几乎没有研究证据支持或反驳这些说法。为儿童教育应用程序提供更清晰的证据和指南，将为护理人员、幼儿从业人员和儿童应用程序开发人员提供宝贵的知识。该项目的目的是调查儿童语言学习应用程序，以发展对应用程序市场的科学理解，并将学习，记忆和语言习得的发展理论应用于教育触摸屏应用程序的开发。拟议中的项目将结合对儿童教育应用程序市场的系统回顾和一系列实证研究，探索儿童如何从触摸屏应用程序和数字媒体中学习语言。该项目的第一阶段是对应用程序市场进行系统审查，将利用语言习得理论确定目前可供儿童使用的应用程序的教育潜力。这些发现将指导一系列调查儿童应用程序交互和语言学习结果的实证研究。此外，我们将确定儿童应用程序使用过程中照顾者互动对儿童语言学习成果的作用，为美国儿科学会（AAP）（2016）关于儿童屏幕媒体使用过程中父母共同使用的建议提供证据。在这些研究中，本项目将通过为触摸屏应用程序提供基于证据的指导方针，并为基于证据的单词学习应用程序的开发做出贡献，从而加深我们对旨在教授儿童语言的教育触摸屏应用程序的理解。本项目还将通过整合数字媒体中单词学习的证据，为单词学习理论做出重要的理论贡献，从而促进基于证据的青少年教育屏幕媒体的发展的孩子。

Children are growing up in an increasingly digital age, surrounded by digital media in the home, nursery and at school. Children's language development is strongly related to the language that they hear in their environment (Hart & Risley, 1995) and research suggests that parental screen media use reduces the quality and amount of language spoken to their children (Christakis, Gilkerson, Richards, Zimmerman, Garrison et al., 2009; Kirkorian, Pempek, Murphy, Schmidt, & Anderson, 2009; Pempek, Kirkorian, & Anderson, 2014; Radesky, Silverstein, Zuckerman, & Christakis, 2014). At the same time, screen media has the potential to provide a valuable source of language input and educational entertainment for young children. The American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) have recently revised their recommendations for children's screen media use to account for this educational potential (AAP, 2016). The AAP encourage children aged 2-5 years to use screen media but restrict their recommendations to high quality educational screen media which should be used alongside their parents and caregivers and for less than 1 hour per day (AAP, 2016). The question remains however, what constitutes educational screen media for young children? For touchscreen apps, a recent review paper highlighted that apps that promote active, engaged, meaningful and socially interactive learning have the potential to educate young children (Hirsh-Pasek, Zosh, Golinkoff, Gray, Robb & Kaufman, 2015). While 72% of apps aimed at children are classed as "educational" (Shuler, Levine & Ree, 2012), there is little research evidence to back up or contradict these claims. Clearer evidence and guidelines for children's educational apps would provide invaluable knowledge for caregivers, early years practitioners and children's app developers.The aim of this project is to investigate children's language learning apps to develop a scientific understanding of the app marketplace and to apply developmental theories of learning, memory and language acquisition to the development of educational touchscreen apps. The proposed project will combine a systematic review of the children's educational app marketplace with a series of empirical studies to explore how children learn language from touchscreen apps and digital media. The first phase of this project, a systematic review of the app marketplace, will to determine the educational potential for apps currently available to children using theories of language acquisition. These findings will then guide a series of empirical studies investigating children's app interaction and language learning outcomes. Furthermore, we will determine the role of caregiver interaction during children's app use on children's language learning outcomes to provide evidence on the AAP (2016) recommendation for parental co-use during children's screen media use. Across these studies, this project will advance our understanding of educational touchscreen apps designed to teach children language by providing evidence-based guidelines for touchscreen apps and contributing to the development of an evidence based word learning app. This project will also make important theoretical contributions to theories of word learning by incorporating evidence for word learning from digital media and as a result promote the development of evidence-based educational screen media for young children.