Abstract
In recent years, touch screens and digital technologies have permeated all aspects of our lives and increasing numbers of children engage with those devices and digital media every day. Children age 8 or younger use tablets and digital applications for various activities including watching videos, playing digital games or reading e-books. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents should use high-quality educational media as well as engage in meaningful parent-child interactions in conjunction with tablet device use. In the literature, there is currently limited research that investigates parent-child joint activities and talk around touch screen tablets. The main goal of the study was to examine mother-child talk as they engaged in three distinct digital activities (e-book reading, video watching, and game playing) on a touch screen tablet device. It was expected that different types of mother-child talk would be observed during each digital activity. Three hypotheses were tested in the study. The first hypothesis predicted that there would be a difference in the total number utterances generated by mothers and children during three digital activities. The second hypothesis predicted that there would be a difference in the total number of utterances generated during e-book reading, compared to video watching and game playing. The third hypothesis predicted that there would be a positive correlation between children's utterances across three digital activities and the measure of their receptive vocabulary. The current study's research design was a within subjects (repeated measures) design where all participating mothers and children were engaged in three different digital activities in a different order. The findings of the current study suggest that mothers generated more utterances than their children across three digital activities. In addition, the type of digital activity caused differences in the total number of utterances generated by mothers and children. The findings of the study also demonstrated that the measure of children's receptive vocabulary was not statistically correlated with the type or frequency of child utterances observed across the three digital activities.