Understanding the story is an important ability that benefits the child in various activities, but at the same time it also affects the development of more complex abilities. In today's era, children are exposed to different forms of stories, but they do not offer them the same conditions for understanding.
In our master's thesis, we investigated how different types of media influence a child's success in understanding the story. Nowadays, children are often exposed to animated films, somewhat less often to audio stories, but they still receive traditional, written forms of stories, with added illustrations. It is for this reason that we checked how successful the child's understanding is in the case of exposure to only auditory information, auditory-visual information with added illustration and auditory-visual information with added animation. We included preschool children between the ages of four and seven. We deliberately selected a linguistically and content-quality stimulus, and we checked the understanding of the story with the help of three tasks: reconstructing the story, assessing the correctness of the statements and arranging the pictures in the correct time sequence.
The results of the research showed that added visual information in the form of animation contributes to (temporally) more extensive retteling, while in the field of remembering important events, recalling explicitly exposed linguistic information and sequential reasoning or memorizing the time sequence of events, it is not possible to confirm the influence of the type of media on the child's performance. Here, it is important to emphasize that these findings can only be generalized to stories with good content and language.
Our research can help speech and language pathologists and other professionals in their work and especially in guiding parents when using digital forms of stories, while it is still necessary to take into account the guidelines on the use of digital screens.
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