How do kids engage with spoken stories?

Western University
Supervised by Dr. Blake Butler

Background

For my MSc thesis, I set out to investigate how kids with hearing loss engage with spoken language and the effort they experience while listening. A review of the existing research on listening effort revealed a major gap — the experiments being conducted in the lab were nothing like how people listen to speech in real life. And if we're not creating situations that resemble real-world listening, then how do we know we're getting a realistic measure of listening effort?

To solve this issue, I decided to use spoken stories — like the kind you'd hear in audiobooks or podcasts — to study listening effort. But first, I had to answer the question: What kinds of spoken stories do kids like the most?

The Problem

Think of the last story you read or heard. Were you reading a physical print book? Or were you listening to a podcast during your morning commute, skimming an article between meetings, or enjoying an audiobook while running errands?

In an increasingly digital world, more people than ever are turning to new story formats, children and youth included. Despite the clear popularity of digital story media for children, the existing literature on how children engage with spoken stories was nearly nonexistent. I knew I would need to conduct my own survey if I wanted to make sure I was creating the most engaging stories possible.

Methods

I created an online survey which was completed by parents of 72 kids aged 8-13. This survey asked parents about the types of spoken stories their kids listened to. Since the existing literature was so scarce, we wanted to know everything: how long kids listened, how often, through which formats, and most of all, what kinds of stories they liked.

I asked parents: "If you could write a story that your child would love listening to, what would you include?" I got lots of detailed answers from which I was able to extract some common themes.

Key Findings

Based on our survey, it was obvious that kids were listening — and often. 74% of kids in our sample listened to spoken stories, and the vast majority of those (92.5%) listened at least once a week.

Further, kids were listening for long durations — 64.1% listened for at least 15 minutes per session. We also found that older kids (age 11-13) tended to listen for longer than younger kids (age 8-10).

As for the types of stories kids listened to, fantasy was the most popular genre by far — 84.9% of kids listened to fantasy, and 54.7% listed it as their favourite.

So what did parents say about the story they'd write for their kids? The most popular element was comedy, mentioned by 41.5% of parents. Other prominent themes included action (31.7%), suspense (26.8%), magic/sci-fi (24.4%), real life situations (22%), and animals (19.5%).

Impact

So how did we use all of this information? Well, using these responses as our guide, we hired a children's author to write four short stories for us: one was a fantasy story about a dragon, one was an adventure story about a bear attack, one was a realistic story involving conflict between two friends, and the other was a funny story about a boy with super powers.

We also made sure that the length of the stories aligned with how long kids typically liked to listen. Since most kids listened for at least 15 minutes, and each kid was going to listen to three of the stories, we made each story between 5 and 6 minutes long for a total of 15-18 minutes of listening time.

With these engaging stories, we can now be sure that our measure of listening effort better represents how these kids are hearing speech in real life. I believe this work also has implications beyond the scope of my thesis — it is my hope that this work is the start of a much-needed effort to make audiobooks and podcasts more accessible for individuals with impaired hearing.

For more information, check out my preprint

or contact me at sarah@bobbitt.ca