Exploring the sense of smell in shared digital book reading: An experiment

Abstract

Shared book reading during early childhood contributes to children's development in many important ways. This small-scale experiment, the first of its kind in the emerging field of olfactory research, explores whether reading a digital book with accompanying smell stimulation has a measurable effect on children's engagement, vocabulary acquisition, story comprehension, and overall interest in reading and smell. The study was conducted with 65 4- and 5-year-old Norwegian-speaking children, attending ECEC centers. Olfactory stimulation did not produce higher scores on post-experiment vocabulary and story comprehension, only the control variables of gender and prior vocabulary knowledge significantly predicted vocabulary and story comprehension scores. However, children's engagement was higher for stories with accompanying olfactory stimulation. Future research could integrate odour release into the reading device to not disrupt the reading process, and more reliably test the hypothesis that olfactory stimulation is conducive to reading engagement and learning outcomes.