Do interactions speak louder than words? Dialogic reading of an interactive tablet-based e-book with children between 16 months and three years of age

Dialogic reading, in which the reader prompts the child to speak while listening to the story being read, represents a promising way to boost children’s lingual development but it is unclear how content interactivity and agency affect the technique. We used video interaction analysis to investigate the effect of interactive elements on speech production of 12 children between the ages of 16 and 33 months when engaged in individual dialogic reading sessions with a tablet-based e-book. Interaction with interactive elements did not reduce the children’s responses to dialogic reading prompts. Spontaneous utterances were longer than prompted ones and the children’s engagement with interactive elements or sounds coming from the application most often triggered these spontaneous utterances.