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.

除了儿童定向语音 (CDS) 和书籍外，触摸屏应用程序中的语言可以作为儿童语言输入的额外来源。在这里，我们对应用程序中的语言进行了首次分析，并与书籍和 CDS 进行了比较。我们分析了 18 种最流行的针对学龄前儿童的教育应用程序中的语言，并将它们的语言内容与儿童读物和 CDS 的结构类型和词汇的心理语言学特征进行了比较。我们发现，与 CDS 相比，应用程序包含频率较低的单词，词汇多样性较低，与书籍相比，话语更短。由于包含较少出现的单词，应用程序可能因此为幼儿提供丰富的补充输入形式。然而，应用程序不会让孩子接触到高比例的问题和复杂的句子，