Department of Psychology, School of Health and Society, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, UK.
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
J Child Lang. 2023 Jul;50(4):895-921. doi: 10.1017/S0305000922000198. Epub 2022 Apr 28.
Language in touchscreen apps could be useful as an additional source of children's language input, alongside child directed speech (CDS) and books. Here we performed the first analysis of language in apps, as compared with books and CDS. We analysed language in 18 of the most popular educational apps targeting pre-schoolers and compared their language content to children's books and CDS with respect to types of constructions and psycholinguistic features of words. We found that apps contained lower frequency words and had lower lexical diversity compared to CDS, and shorter utterances compared to books. Apps may thus provide an enriched supplementary form of input for young children, due to containing less frequent words. However, apps do not expose children to a high proportion of questions and complex sentences, both of which are crucial for supporting child's development of structurally rich constructions.
在触屏应用程序中的语言可以作为儿童语言输入的额外来源，与儿童导向的言语（CDS）和书籍并列。在这里，我们首次对应用程序中的语言进行了分析，与书籍和 CDS 进行了比较。我们分析了针对学龄前儿童的 18 个最受欢迎的教育应用程序中的语言，并比较了它们的语言内容与儿童书籍和 CDS 中关于构词类型和单词心理语言学特征方面的内容。我们发现，与 CDS 相比，应用程序中的单词出现频率较低，词汇多样性也较低，与书籍相比，应用程序中的句子也较短。因此，由于应用程序包含不太常见的单词，因此它们可能为幼儿提供了一种丰富的补充输入形式。但是，应用程序并没有让孩子接触到大量的问题和复杂句子，而这些都是支持孩子发展结构丰富的构词法的关键。
