Do congruent gestures on touchscreens enhance young children's word learning?

Touchscreen-based learning environments are increasingly common in early childhood, yet evidence regarding the benefits of interactivity for word learning has been mixed. One possible reason is that not all forms of interaction support learning equally. Understanding how children's touchscreen gestures relate to linguistic content may help clarify when and why interactive learning is effective.

The present study examined whether gesture-meaning congruency-the alignment between a child's touchscreen gestures and a word's semantic content-facilitates word learning in preschool-aged children.

Participants were 205 children aged 5-6 years.

Across two experiments, children were taught novel verbs presented on a touchscreen. Experiment 1 compared three conditions-congruent gestures (dragging), incongruent gestures (tapping), and watching (no interaction)-when learning continuous verbs. Experiment 2 employed a 2 × 2 design crossing gesture type (dragging vs. tapping) with verb type (continuous vs. discrete). Children's word learning was assessed using recognition and recall tasks.

In Experiment 1, both gesture conditions improved recognition relative to the watching condition. Recall performance was low and hence should be interpreted cautiously. In Experiment 2, recognition showed a gesture type × verb type interaction: children performed better when dragging was paired with continuous verbs and tapping was paired with discrete verbs than when the gesture and verb type were mismatched.

These findings suggest that touchscreen interactivity may support children's word learning most effectively when the child's gesture is aligned with the semantic structure of the target word. Gesture-meaning congruency may therefore be an important boundary condition for designing gesture-based vocabulary learning activities.