Interactive Audio Pens, Home Literacy Activities and Emergent Literacy Skills

Interactive audio pens – pens that contain a built-in speaker and that can be used in combination with books that are made for this purpose – are new, commercially available technological developments that have found widespread dissemination. In the current paper, we studied the availability and use of these interactive audio pens and their associations with home literacy activities and children’s emergent literacy skills in a sample of 103 German preschool children. We found that the availability of interactive audio pens at home showed small positive relations to children’s verbal short-term memory. Home literacy activities were not correlated to the availability of interactive audio pens. Results are discussed against the background of current research in multimedia storybook reading.