No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Two Different Communication Genres and Implications for Vocabulary Development and Learning to Read
Abstract
This study examined potential differences in vocabulary found in picture books and adult’s speech to children and to other adults. Using a small sample of various sources of speech and print, Hayes observed that print had a more extensive vocabulary than speech. The current analyses of two different spoken language databases and an assembled picture book corpus replicated and extended these findings. The vocabulary in picture books was more extensive than that found in child-directed speech (CDS) and even adult-directed speech (ADS). The likelihood of observing a rare word not contained in the most common 5,000 words in English was more likely in a corpus of picture books than in two different corpora of CDS. The likelihood of a rare word in the picture books was even greater than that found in ADS. It is proposed that these differences are more indicative of informal versus formal language rather than the spoken versus written modalities per se. Nonetheless, these results highlight the value of rich read-aloud experiences for vocabulary development and potentially for reading comprehension once written language is acquired. These findings are described in terms of a distinction between formal and informal language, which has implications for views of literacy, cognitive and linguistic development, and learning to read.
... Picturebooks are unique in that they establish a link between pictures and text and are designed to entertain young readers (Massaro, 2015). This harmony in picturebooks constitute a semiotic whole, since the interaction between the verbal and the visual systems is a "conditio sine qua non for the construction of the narrative meaning and for the fruition and enjoyment of the genre" (Sezzi, 2020, p. 216). ...
... Hayes and Ahrens (1988) calculated that the percentage of rare words in children's books is 30.9, compared to 9.9 rare words in the speech of adults talking to children, commonly referred to as Child-Directed Speech (CDS). More recently, Massaro (2015) and Montag (2019) found, by comparing it to CDS, that picturebooks contain almost three times more rare words than CDS. Montag, Jones and Smith´s (2015) study of the new words that appear in picturebooks for children aged 0-60 months also corroborates this finding. ...
... We excluded informational picturebooks, because this genre includes scientific terms and thus includes many more rare words than fiction. As Massaro (2015) notes, the presence of new words is expected to be larger in informational books. ...
This study shows how the language in translated picturebooks is enriched by the use of rare words. We document how the translation of picturebooks from English to Portuguese results in the use of rare words in Portuguese. Evidence indicates that children learn new vocabulary through readings of picturebooks (Noble et al., 2019) and that translators make choices that contribute to the use of rare words (Ketola, 2018). The sample of 86 picturebooks was selected from a list recommended by the Portuguese national reading plan for 3-5-year-olds. The identification of rare words was done using a frequency analysis in both Portuguese, using ESCOLEX, and English, using the ChildFreq tool. Findings indicate that translated picturebooks use rich and varied lexicon and include an average of 6.6 rare words. Twenty-two percent of these words originate from literal and non-literal translations and are not rare in the original texts. This indicates that the process of translation contributes to increasing children's exposure to rare words.
... A children's book can be analyzed as a "language model" (Hoff, 2006) that enables children to develop their language skills with the help of a reading person. On the word level, analyses of linguistic corpora have demonstrated that children's books contain more diverse vocabulary than the language adults use in everyday situations with their children (called child-directed speech; Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015). More specifically, the texts in children's books for children aged birth to six years contain more unique words, so-called types, than child-directed speech of adults talking to children in the same age range (Montag et al., 2015). ...
... From a corpus linguistics perspective, storybooks exhibit many characteristics which suggest that their use in shared reading sessions has the potential to foster grammar, comprehension monitoring, and narrative comprehension skills. Storybooks contain much more low frequent words than average child-directed speech (Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015) and feature complex grammatical forms which rarely occur in child-directed speech outside Literacy environments and children's language skills. In a meta-analysis, Mol and Bus (2011) found that parents' storybook exposure and HLE questionnaires explained the same amount of variance in preschoolers' vocabulary skills. ...
... On the basis of previous studies (Davidse et al., 2011;Sénéchal et al., 1996;Zhang et al., 2017), we hypothesize that preschoolers' storybook exposure is related to vocabulary. In addition, as storybooks contain complex language and narration (Cameron-Faulkner & Noble, 2013;Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015;Pantaleo & Sipe, 2012), we expect that preschoolers' storybook exposure is also related to grammar and HLL skills. ...
Storybooks and talk centered around shared reading contain more rare words, complex syntax, and narrative structures than the language that caregivers usually use when talking to children. Therefore, interactive storybook reading has the potential to facilitate children’s acquisition of lower level language (LLL) skills (e.g., vocabulary, grammar) and higher level language (HLL) skills (e.g., comprehension monitoring, narrative comprehension). This dissertation addresses gaps in shared storybook reading research pertaining to questions of assessment, intervention, and early literacy models. It investigates from a developmental and educational perspective how shared reading in the home literacy environment (HLE) and the child care literacy environment (CCLE) is related to children’s oral language skills. The first aim is to validate two recognition tests for German-speaking participants. This allows an objective and economic assessment of storybook exposure and adult literature exposure, both of which are related to children’s language development. The second aim is to clarify (a) the relation between parent and child as literacy agents in a home literacy model of shared reading, and (b) whether shared reading is related to children’s HLL skills besides being related to their LLL skills. The third aim is to test the effectiveness of a narrative dialogic reading intervention targeting LLL and HLL skills. To this end, four studies were conducted.
Study 1 validated a storybook title recognition test (TRT) for German-speaking preschoolers and caregivers. The TRT captures relative differences in the amount of shared reading. In structural equation models, the TRT was a unique predictor of preschoolers’ language skills, explaining about 50% of variance in language skills. By contrast, questionnaire measures of socioeconomic status and home literacy environment did not explain additional variance in language skills.
Study 2 validated an author recognition test (ART) for 13 to 80-year-old German-speaking readers. The ART is a measure of leisure reading that explains a substantial amount of variance in caregivers’ language skills, which is in turn related to children’s language development. Even though print exposure accumulates with time, several life span studies did not find a positive relation between reader age and ART scores. Study 2 used a sample of 13- to 77-year-old readers. The recognition probability of classic authors increased between ages 15 and 65. By contrast, the recognition probability of recent authors only increased between ages 15 and 45. The author mean publication year turned out to be a key variable for estimating print exposure in age-diverse samples. This author variable should be taken into account when modelling relationships between literacy environments and children’s language skills, especially if the age of caregivers varies (e.g., adolescent siblings, parents, grand-parents).
Study 3 examined how HLE and CCLE are related to preschoolers’ storybook exposure and how the storybook exposure of preschoolers, parents, and child care workers is related to LLL and HLL skills. Parents’ exposure to storybooks was a unique predictor of children’s vocabulary and grammar skills. Parents’ storybook exposure was also moderately related to children’s storybook exposure, which in turn explained unique variance in vocabulary, grammar, comprehension monitoring, and narrative comprehension. Therefore, the storybook exposure of children and parents should be conceptualized as related, but separate variables in models of the home literacy environment. Moreover, models should differentiate between LLL and HLL skills as correlates and outcomes of shared reading.
Study 4 developed a narrative dialogic reading intervention with wordless picture books that targeted preschoolers’ LLL and HLL skills. The intervention had small short-term effects on narrative comprehension and vocabulary skills. Comparisons with an alternative treatment and a no treatment group showed that the effects were due to the specific intervention contents. Individual differences in storybook exposure and general cognitive abilities did not moderate intervention gains. Children in control groups caught up after five months, with the exception of inferential narrative comprehension, where intervention effects were maintained at first follow-up. This indicates that narrative dialogic reading provided a unique opportunity to preschoolers for learning inferential narrative comprehension skills.
In sum, this dissertation provides new methods and insights for the assessment of print exposure and shows that narrative dialogic reading fosters a broad range of oral language skills. Regarding the refinement of early literacy models, additional analyses showed that, above children’s and parents’ storybook exposure, the ART was a unique predictor of LLL skills. Parental leisure reading and shared storybook reading were connected to children’s oral language skills through multiple pathways that should be represented in early literacy models.
... "Affective quality of the mother-child relationship: longitudinal consequences for children's school-relevant cognitive functioning," Developmental Psychology, vol. 23 (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18) • კვების დროს მოსწონს საკვებით თამაში (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • დახმარებით იცვამს ფეხსაცმელებს (20-24) • სახელურის გადატრიალებით აღებს კარს (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • ცოტათი ესხმება, მაგრამ შეუძლია ჭიქიდან დამოუკიდებლად დალევა (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) სოციალურ/ემოციური • იმეორებს სხვების, განსაკუთრებით უფროსების ქცევას (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • უხარია სხვა ბავშვებთან ყოფნა (20-24) ...
... "Affective quality of the mother-child relationship: longitudinal consequences for children's school-relevant cognitive functioning," Developmental Psychology, vol. 23 (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18) • კვების დროს მოსწონს საკვებით თამაში (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • დახმარებით იცვამს ფეხსაცმელებს (20-24) • სახელურის გადატრიალებით აღებს კარს (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • ცოტათი ესხმება, მაგრამ შეუძლია ჭიქიდან დამოუკიდებლად დალევა (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) სოციალურ/ემოციური • იმეორებს სხვების, განსაკუთრებით უფროსების ქცევას (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • უხარია სხვა ბავშვებთან ყოფნა (20-24) ...
... "Affective quality of the mother-child relationship: longitudinal consequences for children's school-relevant cognitive functioning," Developmental Psychology, vol. 23 (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18) • კვების დროს მოსწონს საკვებით თამაში (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • დახმარებით იცვამს ფეხსაცმელებს (20-24) • სახელურის გადატრიალებით აღებს კარს (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • ცოტათი ესხმება, მაგრამ შეუძლია ჭიქიდან დამოუკიდებლად დალევა (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) სოციალურ/ემოციური • იმეორებს სხვების, განსაკუთრებით უფროსების ქცევას (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24) • უხარია სხვა ბავშვებთან ყოფნა (20-24) ...
... Picture books are 50% more likely than parent-child interactions to include rare words that aren't among the 5,000 most common words in the English language (Massaro, 2015;Vivas, 1996;Wells, 1983). The rich language, cultural and international diversity in picture books exposes children to unknown worlds and extensive vocabularies (Kümmerling-Meibauer, 2017). ...
... Shared book reading stimulates children's oral language skills and builds their comprehension of unknown words (De Jong and Leserman, 2001;Fletcher and Reese, 2005;Isbel et al., 2004). Reading picture books to babies matters because the sooner children acquire language, the more likely they are to master it (Massaro, 2015). 'One of the most powerful pieces of shared reading is what happens in the pauses between pages and after the book is closed' (Duursma et al., 2008: 556). ...
... Early language exposure significantly affects how language networks are created in the brain (Hart and Risley, 1995). Young children understand so much more, in terms of vocabulary and concepts, than they can possibly verbalize in the early stages of literacy (Massaro, 2015). ...
In this study, the researchers explored the impact of reading aloud on language acquisition for 12 infants and toddlers (6–22 months old) attending a preschool located in South Florida. The research team included university professors, a preschool director and two preschool teachers. A teacher assistant read a selected picture book to each child individually for 10 weeks using scripts with prompts to assess receptive and expressive language. In addition to the book scripts, data collection included parent surveys, observation, developmental checklists, videotaping and field notes. Researchers measured each child's length of engaged time and level of engagement individually and as a whole group. Results indicate that participants demonstrated book preferences in terms of engagement, with the toddlers showing interest in books on familiar topics. Effective read-aloud strategies and techniques for young children are shared to promote the love of literacy.
... Their power is considered to lie in the language that books carry because this written language is typically more varied and complex in contrast to spoken language. According to an estimate that used English material, childdirected print carries two-and-a-half times more word types and three times more rare words than child-directed conversational speech (Massaro, 2015). In addition to more diverse and rare words, the language encountered in child-directed * Sonali Nag ...
... Corpora differ in size. For example, in English, corpora in influential studies have ranged from 57,000 words from 112 picture books (Massaro, 2015) to 68,103 words from 100 picture books (Montag, 2019;; 319,435 words from 160 fiction books (Dawson et al., 2021;Hsiao et al., 2022); 698,286 words from 40 texts of imaginative fiction (Thompson & Sealey, 2007) and 2.4 million words from 1708 fiction and nonfiction documents (Montag & MacDonald, 2015). Examples of substantial corpora sizes in other European languages include 10 million words from 500 German books (Schroeder et al., 2015), 4.1 million words from 155 Norwegian children's books (Dyvik et al., 2016) and 1.3 million words from 116 Greek textbooks (Terzopoulos et al., 2017). ...
Child-directed print corpora enable systematic psycholinguistic investigations, but this research infrastructure is not available in many understudied languages. Moreover, researchers of understudied languages are dependent on manual tagging because precise automatized parsers are not yet available. One plausible way forward is to limit the intensive work to a small-sized corpus. However, with little systematic enquiry about approaches to corpus construction, it is unclear how robust a small corpus can be made. The current study examines the potential of a non-sequential sampling protocol for small corpus development (NSP-SCD) through a cross-corpora and within-corpus analysis. A corpus comprising 17,584 words was developed by applying the protocol to a larger corpus of 150,595 words from children’s books for 3-to-10-year-olds. While the larger corpus will by definition have more instances of unique words and unique orthographic units, still, the selectively sampled small corpus approximated the larger corpus for lexical and orthographic diversity and was equivalent for orthographic representation and word length. Psycholinguistic complexity increased by book level and varied by parts of speech. Finally, in a robustness check of lexical diversity, the non-sequentially sampled small corpus was more efficient compared to a same-sized corpus constructed by simply using all sentences from a few books (402 books vs. seven books). If a small corpus must be used then non-sequential sampling from books stratified by book level makes the corpus statistics better approximate what is found in larger corpora. Overall, the protocol shows promise as a tool to advance the science of child language acquisition in understudied languages.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-024-02339-x.
... Dawson and colleagues also reported that picture book vocabulary contained more adjectives and nouns than child-directed speech, and that these words were longer, and more abstract and emotionally arousing than those used in speech, while they also contained more affixes and had a later age of acquisition. Finally, Massaro (2015) reported that children were about 3 times more likely to encounter a new low-frequency word while listening to a reading of a picture book relative to listening to their caregiver's speech. These findings have been taken to suggest that exposure to text via read-aloud experiences may benefit vocabulary acquisition and possibly reading comprehension once children begin to learn to read. ...
... 1. In this article, we do not discuss picture books as they target younger (pre-school) children (0-5 years) and are typically not used for independent reading (but see Dawson et al., 2021;Green et al., 2023;Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015, for analyses of picture book corpora of different sizes). We also do not discuss lexical databases available for languages other than English, but we refer the reader to Soares et al., 2014, for Portuguese, Lété et al., 2004 Thorndike (1921), who compiled a 10,000-word list ("The Teacher's Word Book") from texts such as the Bible, English classics, and textbooks that children were supposedly reading at the time; Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996), who developed a 760,000-word corpus of children's books written in the 19th-20th centuries and another corpus (of similar size) of contemporary children's fiction; and Zeno et al. (1995), who developed word frequency lists for American English. ...
This article introduces CYP-LEX, a large-scale lexical database derived from books popular with children and young people in the United Kingdom. CYP-LEX includes 1,200 books evenly distributed across three age bands (7-9, 10-12, 13+) and comprises over 70 million tokens and over 105,000 types. For each word in each age band, we provide its raw and Zipf-transformed frequencies, all parts-of-speech in which it occurs with raw frequency and lemma for each occurrence, and measures of count-based contextual diversity. Together and individually, the three CYP-LEX age bands contain substantially more words than any other publicly available database of books for primary and secondary school children. Most of these words are very low in frequency, and a substantial proportion of the words in each age band do not occur on British television. Although the three age bands share some very frequent words, they differ substantially regarding words that occur less frequently, and this pattern also holds at the level of individual books. Initial analyses of CYP-LEX illustrate why independent reading constitutes a challenge for children and young people, and they also underscore the importance of reading widely for the development of reading expertise. Overall, CYP-LEX provides unprecedented information into the nature of vocabulary in books that British children aged 7+ read, and is a highly valuable resource for those studying reading and language development.
... leagues also reported that picture book vocabulary contained more adjectives and nouns 113 than child-directed speech, and that these words were longer, and more abstract and emo-114 tionally arousing than those used in speech, while they also contained more affixes and 115 had a later age of acquisition. Finally, Massaro (2015) reported that children were about 116 3 times more likely to encounter a new low-frequency word while listening to a reading of 117 a picture book relative to listening to their caregiver's speech. These findings have been 118 taken to suggest that exposure to text via read-aloud experiences may benefit vocabulary 119 acquisition and possibly reading comprehension once children begin to learn to read. ...
... 1 In this article, we do not discuss picture books as they target younger (pre-school) children (0-5 years) and are typically not used for independent reading (but see Dawson et al., 2021;Green et al., 2023;Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015, for analyses of picture book corpora of different sizes). We also do not discuss lexical databases available for languages other than English, but we refer the reader to Soares et al., 2014, for Portuguese, Lété et al., 2004, for French, Schroeder et al., 2015, for German, Terzopoulos et al., 2017, for Greek, and Li et al., 2023 For earlier lexicographic work, see Thorndike (1921), who compiled a 10,000-word list ("The Teacher's Word Book") from texts such as the Bible, English classics, and textbooks that children were supposedly reading at the time; Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996), who developed a 760,000-word corpus of children's books written in the 19th-20th centuries and another corpus (of similar size) of contemporary children's fiction; and Zeno et al. (1995), who developed word frequency lists for American English. ...
This article introduces CYP-LEX, a large-scale lexical database derived from books popular with children and young people in the United Kingdom. CYP-LEX includes 1,200 books evenly distributed across three age bands (7–9, 10–12, 13+) and comprises over 70 million tokens and over 105,000 types. For each word in each age band, we provide its raw and Zipf-transformed frequencies, all parts-of-speech in which it occurs with raw frequency and lemma for each occurrence, and measures of count-based contextual diversity. Together and individually, the three CYP-LEX age bands contain substantially more words than any other publicly available database of books for primary and secondary school children. Most of these words are very low in frequency, and a substantial proportion of the words in each age band do not occur on British television. Although the three age bands share some very frequent words, they differ substantially regarding words that occur less frequently, and this pattern also holds at the level of individual books. Initial analyses of CYP-LEX illustrate why independent reading constitutes a challenge for children and young people, and they also underscore the importance of reading widely for the development of reading expertise. Overall, CYP-LEX provides unprecedented information into the nature of vocabulary in books that British children aged 7+ read, and is a highly valuable resource for those studying reading and language development.
... Although wordless picture books contain few or no words, they may also positively contribute to children's language outcomes. Wordless picture books often contain illustrations of low-frequency words which promote child vocabulary development (Massaro, 2015;. In line with Vygotsky's social learning theory (Vygotsky & Cole, 1978), attending to illustrations in picture books provides an ideal infrastructure within which parents can actively scaffold children's development by explaining novel concepts and encouraging children to participate in more sophisticated ways that they would independently be capable of (van Kleeck et al., 1997). ...
... Children's language quality was significantly greater in the text-based picture book condition which aligns with prior suggestions that text-based books contain and elicit more unique word types and more illustrations of those word types compared with other CDS (Massaro, 2015;. Thus, these findings suggest that during toddlerhood, text-based picture books can play an important role in introducing novel words and promoting child vocabulary growth. ...
While the association between shared book reading (SBR) and child language development is well documented, there has been less focus on how book characteristics may differentially elicit parents' language input and hence differentially relate to children's language skills during this activity. Moreover, despite the positive and unique role that fathers have been shown to play for children's language, the father-child SBR evidence base is small. Accordingly, the present study examined variation in father and child language quantity, quality, complexity, and function during SBR with text-based and wordless picture books and explored associations between fathers' language and children's language during these episodes. Participants were 46 father-child dyads (20 females). Fathers' mean age was 38.74 years (SD = 5.74), and children's mean age was 37.89 months (SD = 2.71). Findings indicate that fathers in the textbook condition produced significantly greater language quality, extended the topic more, and produced more conversational utterances but described and labeled pictures less than fathers in the wordless picture book condition. Fathers' language during both SBR episodes showed differential links with child's language and may suggest that fathers were fine-tuning their language in accordance with their child's language skills (effect sizes ranged from r = .45 to r = .78). It is possible that variation in book content may encourage different types of learning with distinct effects on different domains of child language. Should future research replicate such differential relations, findings may inform caretakers and early childhood interventions with the aim of promoting children's books tailored to specific language areas of interest.
... Further, during book sharing, caregivers tend to produce more topic-continuing replies, more referential language, and more decontextualized talk than during other child-centered activities (Dunn et al., 1977;Gilkerson, Richards, & Topping, 2017;Soderstrom & Wittebolle, 2013;Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019). Book sharing has also been singled out as a particularly rich opportunity for children to be exposed to rare words and complex grammar, though this effect likely results from which book texts are read, rather than what caregivers produce spontaneously (Massaro, 2015;Weizman & Snow, 2001). Comparing the texts of 100 common picture books to texts in corpora of child-directed speech, Montag (2019) found that rare sentence types, such as relative clauses and passives, occurred more frequently in book text than in spontaneous talk during toy play or mealtimes recorded in lab or home settings. ...
... Book sharing is a good thing to do. Our findings reaffirm the conclusions of dozens of previous studies showing that book sharing is a source of supportive features for language learning (Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2018;Weizman & Snow, 2001). Our results also support previous studies that suggest that book sharing may not need to occupy a large portion of the day to meaningfully impact language environments (Montag et al., 2018). ...
Caregivers vary in how often and in what ways they engage verbally with their child, and this variation is associated with positive child outcomes (Hart & Risley, 1995). Does this variation reflect the activities (e.g., play, book sharing) in which caregivers and children engage? Or, is variation in verbal engagement a stable feature of children’s learning environments regardless of what activities occur? We sampled daylong LENA audio-recordings in English- (n = 45) and Spanish-speaking (n = 45) families with 24-month-old children in the U.S., transcribing the six densest 10-min segments of speech directed to target children (tCDS) per family. On average, caregivers spent ~50% of time engaged in child-centered activities (e.g., book sharing, play), ~20% in adult-centered activities (e.g., cooking), and ~30% not engaging verbally with the target child (non-tCDS). Caregivers were more likely to imitate/expand on their children’s utterances during all child- than adult-centered activities. Book sharing, occurring in only ~50% of families, was associated with longer utterances (MLUw) and more responses than adult-centered activities. Children who experienced more minutes in child-centered activities, especially book sharing, heard significantly more total words than children who experienced fewer minutes in child-centered activities. In families without book sharing, time in other child- and adult-centered activities was associated with more total words. Adult-centered activities tended to be more lexically diverse than other child-centered activities. Evidence for moderate stability within families was found in word tokens and mean utterance length. These results highlight that variation in features of child-directed speech derives from multiple sources.
... NELP results indicated positive impact of shared reading and interactive shared reading (dialogic reading) on oral language and listening comprehension skills. As Massaro (2015) noted, children's books have many more unfamiliar words than child-adult conversations, so vocabulary can be developed through intentional teacher focus on word choice and instructional routines (Beck et al., 2002) supported by exposure to the vocabulary through shared reading. Research supports whole and small group shared reading using evidence-based techniques including dialogic reading, word elaborations, print referencing, exposure to varied genres of text, and repetition of texts to increase understanding (Pentimonti et al., 2013). ...
... Building content knowledge includes developing rich vocabulary and oral language skills to understand and discuss concepts across a multitude of academic topics. This need for contentconnected vocabulary and oral language instruction is present for all children (Massaro, 2015), but particularly important for English learners and children living in poverty (Tyner & Kabourek, 2020). Additionally, researchers have found limited focus on genres such as informational text in preschool classrooms (Pentimonti et al., 2011). ...
A key to reducing reading difficulty, particularly for children living in poverty, is to provide high quality, explicit, and well-planned instruction from the start of a child’s school career. Preschools that provide quality language, literacy, and content instruction have produced promising positive effects on children’s later academic achievement. However, many preschool programs are not equipped to provide quality instruction due to lack of teacher preparation and/or curriculum materials. Even teachers with advanced degrees may struggle with instruction due to weak and/or non-existent instructional materials. This project piloted a low-cost, research-based language and literacy instructional program for preschool children living in poverty. Results of the implementation school were compared to two control groups (low-income and middle-income populations) and indicated meaningful skill development as evidenced by gap-closing rates of growth and decrease in percentage of children at risk for reading challenges.
... The goal was to build a smart room for the acquisition of literacy. We obtained a US Patent, Method And System For Acquisition Of Literacy (Massaro, 2015), that set the stage for this initial work. The goal was to create a smart room that monitors child/caregiver normal interactions to embed the child in written language. ...
... By embedding the child's meaningful experience in written language, their learning to read becomes embodied in the same manner as learning spoken language. Our other research has shown that the language of picture books is more challenging than spoken language so this exposure is valuable in the development of vocabulary, grammar, and language comprehension (Massaro, 2015). It has also been shown that reading ability at age 7 is a strong predictor of social economic status as middle age adults. ...
... Zou (2016) states that vocabulary knowledge is an important element in communication and also in second language acquisition. Massaro (2015) suggests that young children should learn vocabulary first to accelerate the development of language acquisition. ...
... In other words, TBI was effective to be implemented for beginner learners because the early learning stage served as a stepping stone to get to the higher level. Massaro (2015) suggests that learners would be better to gain vocabulary in the first stage of learning a language. While conducting the teaching and learning session, teachers were expected to do planning beforehand. ...
This study is intended to enhance students’ reading vocabulary through task-based instruction. It was also devised not only to answer how the strategy can enhance students’ reading vocabulary but also to get data about students’ vocabulary retention two weeks after the implementation and students’ responses towards the strategy. The participantS of this study were 30 ninth graders in SMPN 11 Malang in the second semester of 2019/2020 academic year. Classroom Action Research (CAR) was used as the research design. Vocabulary test, questionnaire, observation sheet, and interview session were the instruments of this study. There were three vocabulary tests, namely vocabulary test one, vocabulary test two, and delayed test. The result showed that there was an improvement in students' scores. 90% of students achieved at least 25 improvement points for the vocabulary test two, 61% of students passed the delayed vocabulary test, and 97.5% of students responded positively toward the strategy. TBI could enhance vocabulary acquisition from the context and task’s characteristics. The context of the text helped students to give a clue about some forgotten vocabularies, so they felt less burdened to remember the vocabulary in the whole text because they generally understand the context of the text. Keywords: task-based instruction, reading vocabulary, vocabulary retention Abstrak: Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk meningkatkan kosakata membaca siswa melalui instruksi berbasis tugas. Penelitian ini juga dirancang tidak hanya untuk menjawab bagaimana strategi yang diterapkan dapat meningkatkan kosakata membaca siswa tetapi juga untuk mendapatkan data tentang retensi kosakata siswa dua minggu setelah penerapan dan tanggapan siswa terhadap strategi yang diberikan. Partisipan penelitian ini adalah 30 siswa kelas 9B di SMPN 11 Malang semester genap tahun ajaran 2019/2020. Penelitian Tindakan Kelas (PTK) digunakan sebagai desain penelitian. Tes kosakata, angket, lembar observasi, dan sesi wawancara menjadi instrumen dalam penelitian ini. Ada tiga tes kosakata yang diberikan, yaitu tes kosakata satu, tes kosakata dua, dan tes tertunda. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ada peningkatan pada nilai siswa: 90% dari keseluruhan siswa mencapai setidaknya 25 peningkatan poin untuk tes kosakata dua, 61% dari keseluruhan siswa mampu melalui tes kosakata tertunda, dan 97.5% dari keseluruhan siswa menanggapi strategi secara positif. TBI dapat meningkatkan penguasaan kosakata dari suatu konteks dan karakteristik tugas. Konteks dari suatu teks membantu siswa mendapatkan petunjuk tentang beberapa kosakata yang telah terlupakan, sehingga mereka merasa tidak terlalu terbebani untuk mengingat kembali kosakata keseluruhan teks karena mereka pada umumnya memahami konteks teks tersebut. Kata kunci: instruksi berbasis tugas, kosakata bacaan, retensi kosakata
... Furthermore, not only do picture books offer a greater variety of words than everyday parentchild conversations, picture books also contain a higher proportion of rare words, a greater number of complex words, and a wider range of sentence structures compared to typical conversations (Massaro, 2015;Montag, 2019). ...
... This constraint can bias speakers to limit word choice by sticking to more frequent words, simpler words, and basic sentence structures. Written language in picture books obviously does not face such constraints and is often by design much more poetic and selective in its word choice (Massaro, 2015). ...
A wealth of research has shown that reading picture books supports several aspects of young children’s learning and development. In this thesis, we explore the hypothesis that the power of picture books is in part due to their referentially transparent nature. To test this possibility, we designed a picture-book version of the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP), an experimental paradigm previously used to quantify the referential transparency of child-directed speech in parent-child interactions. Adult participants (N = 18) were presented with pages from children’s picture books (with text blocked out) and asked to identify either the nouns or the verbs on that page. Our analyses focused on (1) how referential transparency in picture books compared to that of parent-child conversations, (2) how referential transparency differed across word types (i.e. nouns vs. verbs), and (3) whether referential transparency differed as a function of book age-range (i.e., targeting younger vs. older children). Contrary to our hypotheses, picture books were actually less referentially transparent than child-directed speech. We also found that noun transparency was greater than verb transparency, and that transparency did not vary as a function of target age groups. Ongoing research in our laboratory is using these pilot data to further investigate referential transparency in children’s picture books specifically, and how children’s picture books support learning more generally.
... they acquire reading skills, children often enjoy looking at picture books and making sense of picture sequences that form a narrative. Apart from being fun, talking about stories from books with an adult can help children to acquire oral language skills because children's books contain vocabulary and narratives that young children rarely encounter in other situations (Massaro, 2015;Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015). Using children's books for collaborative informal learning activities (referred to as shared reading) is more effective when adults use communicative strategies that activate and scaffold children's thinking (Blewitt, Rump, Shealy, & Cook, 2009;Wasik, Hindman, & Snell, 2016;Zucker, Cabell, Justice, Pentimonti, & Kaderavek, 2013). ...
... Fostering oral language skills with picture books and extratextual talk Picture books possess special linguistic and graphic features that make them multifunctional tools for promoting oral language skills in early childhood. For example, they contain more low frequency words (and illustrations of those words) than average child-directed speech and thus facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary knowledge (Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015). Also, the stories in picture books often follow an episodic narrative structure that consists of the following story grammar elements: an exposition, an initiating event, which is followed by an internal response and an internal plan, leading to a resolution attempt, and a reaction to the outcome of this attempt (Stein & Glenn, 1979). ...
Shared reading has the potential to promote a wide range of language skills that are important for reading acquisition. Dialogic reading interventions in preschool facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary and narrative production skills, but it is unclear (a) whether dialogic reading can also foster inferential and literal narrative comprehension and (b) whether intervention effects are maintained until the beginning of formal reading instruction. To close these two gaps, we designed and conducted a low-dose narrative dialogic reading intervention with wordless picture books. On the child care center level, 201 German preschoolers (Mage = 5;5 years) were randomly assigned to the dialogic reading group, an alternative treatment group, or a no treatment group. Hierarchical linear models showed positive effects of dialogic reading on inferential and literal narrative comprehension and on vocabulary depth and breadth. The effect on inferential narrative comprehension was maintained five months after posttest. Overall, our findings indicate that even a small amount of narrative dialogic reading has small, albeit mostly short-term effects on narrative comprehension and vocabulary skills. We conclude that narrative dialogic reading is a promising approach for supporting the development of preschoolers’ inferential skills. Long-term intervention studies are needed for the evaluation of long-term effects.
... Much of the work investigating pathways by which shared book reading predicts better language and literacy outcomes has focused on the language generated when caregivers read to children. For example, picture books contain more unique words than child-directed speech (Hayes & Ahrens, 1988;Massaro, 2015;Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015), and this lexical diversity does indeed seem to become a part of the spoken language input during book reading. Recordings of caregivers and children interacting in book reading contexts suggest that picture book reading provides children with more speech input and more lexically sophisticated speech than other caregiver-child activities (Crain- Thoreson, Dahlin, & Powell, 2001;Salo, Rowe, Leech, & Cabrera, 2016;Sosa, 2016;Weizman & Snow, 2001). ...
... The present corpus analyses showed that the text of children's picture books contained more passive sentences and sentences containing relative clauses than did typical childdirected speech. This work adds to a growing body of work (Cameron-Faulkner & Noble, 2013;Hayes & Ahrens, 1988;Massaro, 2015; that describes ways in which the language of picture books varies from that of typical speech, and the potential consequences of those differences for the observed benefits of reading to young children. There are strong links between exposure to rare or complex sentence types, and subsequent comprehension and production of those sentence types in children and adults (Clark, 2003;Diessel & Tomasello, 2000;Huttenlocher et al., 2002;Montag & MacDonald, 2015). ...
Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children’s picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which picture book text may systematically differ from typical child-directed speech. The analyses show that picture books contain more rare and complex sentence types, including passive sentences and sentences containing relative clauses, than does child-directed speech. These differences in the patterns of language contained in picture books and typical child-directed speech suggest that one important means by which picture book reading may come to be associated with improved language outcomes is by providing children with types of complex language that might be otherwise rare in their input.
... There are several reasons that account for the benefits of shared reading. Picture books are more likely than everyday child-directed speech to contain low frequency words and structures (Cameron-Faulkner and Noble 2013;Massaro 2015). The meanings in picture books are conveyed through the complex interaction between the visual images and the verbal text (Sierschynski et al. 2014). ...
... Little is known about the influence of peers and older preschoolers on infants' verbal engagement with picture books, an important area for future research (Lee 2013). Some of the differences in the shared reading experiences of the infants may be attributable to the picture book text itself (Massaro 2015;Tare et al. 2010). For example, picture books containing repetitive rhyming features may encourage more verbal participation from infants. ...
Research shows an association between mother-infant shared reading and children’s language and literacy development. Educators in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres frequently interact with groups of similar-aged infants, yet infant-educator shared reading has received little attention. This naturalistic observational study videorecorded 20 focus infants (children aged under 2 years) from 20 separate ECEC centres as they went about their normal everyday activities. Each focus infant was videorecorded for approximately 3 h each (a total of 60 h of data), as part of a larger project investigating the language environment in ECEC infant rooms. The present study investigated whether the infants engaged in book-focused interactions with their educators, and if so, whether the infants participated verbally. Each infant’s book-focused interactions were identified and transcribed verbatim, and each infant’s room was assessed using the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale Revised Edition (ITERS-R) (Listening and Talking Subscale). Nine of the 20 infants did not participate in any shared reading. The extent to which the remaining 11 infants engaged in shared reading ranged from minimal to extensive. In 85% of ECEC rooms, the ITERS-R score for using books was lower than that for helping children understand language and helping children use language. The findings suggest that many educators may be unaware of the importance of reading with infants. Given the benefits of shared reading for infants’ current and future language and literacy development, it is vital that every infant has the opportunity to participate in frequent, sustained, language-rich interactions with their educators.
... From a corpus linguistics perspective, storybooks exhibit many characteristics which suggest that their use in shared reading sessions has the potential to foster grammar, comprehension monitoring, and narrative comprehension skills. Storybooks contain much more low frequent words than average childdirected speech (Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015) and feature complex grammatical forms which rarely occur in child-directed speech outside shared book reading situations (Cameron-Faulkner & Noble, 2013). They also possess diverse narrative structures which could foster children's comprehension monitoring and narrative comprehension skills (Connor et al., 2014;Pantaleo & Sipe, 2012). ...
... On the basis of previous studies (Davidse et al., 2011;Sénéchal et al., 1996;Zhang et al., 2017), we hypothesize that preschoolers' storybook exposure is related to vocabulary. In addition, as storybooks contain complex language and narration (Cameron-Faulkner & Noble, 2013;Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015;Pantaleo & Sipe, 2012), we expect that preschoolers' storybook exposure is also related to grammar and HLL skills. ...
The development of preschoolers’ language skills is influenced by literacy environments and individual differences in storybook exposure. Extant research is limited as most studies (a) investigate the effects on lower level language (LLL; e.g., vocabulary, grammar), but not the effects on higher level language (HLL; e.g., comprehension monitoring, narrative comprehension), and (b) focus on shared reading in the home literacy environment (HLE), but not on the child care literacy environment (CCLE) and the child as active literacy agent. We addressed these two gaps. First, we investigated the contributions of the HLE and the CCLE to the storybook exposure of 201 German preschoolers (MAge = 5; 5 years). A multilevel model showed that parents’ storybook exposure was the most important predictor of children’s storybook exposure. By contrast, child care workers’ storybook exposure was not a significant predictor. Second, we explored the unique contributions of HLE, CCLE, and preschoolers’ storybook exposure to LLL and HLL skills. Multilevel models showed that children’s storybook exposure explained unique variance not only in LLL skills, but also in HLL skills. Literacy environments explained additional variance in LLL skills. In sum, our results suggest that literacy environments are differentially related to children’s storybook exposure and language skills. Our finding that children’s storybook exposure was a unique predictor of vocabulary, grammar, comprehension monitoring, and narrative comprehension indicates that shared book reading has the potential to foster a range of early literacy skills which predict reading comprehension.
... One of the benefits of reading aloud to young children is that it can expose children to words not normally heard in child directed speech. An analysis of a picture book database revealed that the vocabulary in picture books included many more rare words than that found in child directed speech [36]. Rare words tend to be more complex and cognitively challenging than common words. ...
... Rare words tend to be more complex and cognitively challenging than common words. This difference exists because books tend to be a type of formal language whereas speech directed at children or even in the presence of children tends to be informal [36]. Future research might address how reading aloud books influences vocabulary development relative other influences such as child directed speech. ...
... It sheds light on the types of words contained within an oral or written language corpus. Children's books are more lexically diverse and contain a higher proportion of sophisticated words than child-directed speech (Dawson et al., 2021;Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015). As highlighted by Nation et al. (2022), the lexical complexity of written language provides key input that promotes children's language development. ...
We present VOC-ADO, a database of the written vocabulary of French adolescents between the ages of 11 and 15 (French secondary school students). VOC-ADO provides a wealth of lexical information for 110,338 words listed in school textbooks of all disciplines (i.e., academic vocabulary), as well as novels, comics, and magazines (i.e., non-academic vocabulary). For each word, several indexes of frequency and lexical dispersion are reported, as well as word length, syntactic categories, orthographic neighborhood size, and lemma frequency. Each analysis is presented separately for the Academic and Non-academic subcorpora, as well as for the overall Global corpus. Analyses of the corpora indicate that the Academic subcorpus contains a smaller variety of unique words than the Non-academic subcorpus and exhibits higher lexical sophistication. By contrast, there is a larger proportion of content words in non-academic media than in school textbooks. Finally, VOC-ADO shows a strong frequency correlation with Manulex, a French database of elementary school vocabulary, and Lexique, a lexical database of adult vocabulary. However, many words present in VOC-ADO are not found in elementary school vocabulary. These results underscore the need to examine lexical development beyond elementary school, considering the unique characteristics of the written vocabulary encountered by French-speaking adolescents. In this regard, VOC-ADO provides researchers, educators, and clinicians interested in adolescent literacy with a valuable tool to select and analyze words based on specific characteristics. The database is freely available and can be downloaded by clicking on the following link: VOC-ADO Database link.
[Note: As part of the Springer Nature SharedIt initiative, you could access our full paper through the link: https://rdcu.be/egalD].
... ¿Hay beneficios en el acto de escuchar leer en voz alta? Parece que no solo mejora la comprensión lectora (Al-Mansour, 2011; Greene Brabham y Lynch-Brown, 2002) y ayuda a ampliar el vocabulario (Massaro, 2015;Pikulski y Templeton, 2004), también siembra en los que escuchan la inquietud y el gusto por leer (Hemerick, 1999;Louizides, 1993). Otros estudios llevados a cabo por la propia organización WLR apuntan que estos clubs de lectura ayudan a los niños al reconocimiento de sus propias emociones y al desarrollo afectivo, especialmente entre los niños refugiados (Michalek et al., 2021). ...
This issue of Alabe´s honors an initiative that started in Jordan. We Love Reading is a non-profit organization that imbues children with a love for reading. It is committed to instilling that passion in order to generate a positive impact that will empower little ones to lead change in the future. With this mission, the project has evolved to reach 60 countries and offer literacy programs to 10,000 children. The method is simple and easy replicable. Local volunteers offer sessions reading aloud in public spaces for children up to 10 years old. The creator, Dr. Rana Dajani, trusts in the “butterfly effect” of learning to transmit passion for reading. This tool will motivate children’s thinking, their tolerance, understanding, and creativity, among other skills, to change the world.
... Resimli çocuk kitaplarının kelime dağarcığının gelişimini hızlandırma ve geliştirme açısından konuşma diline göre çok daha avantajlı olduğu ortaya konmuştur (Massaro, 2015). Kelime dağarcığını geliştirmenin en önemli yollarından biri çocukların bakımından sorumlu yetişkinlerin çocuklara resimli çocuk kitaplarını sesli okumasıdır (Dickinson ve Smith, 1994;Sénéchal, 1997). ...
Erken çocuklukta hızlı bir gelişim döneminde olan dil gelişimi, erken çocukluğun en önemli görevlerinden biridir ve çocuklarda erken yaşlardan itibaren kelime dağarcığının geliştirilmesi gerekmektedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı resimli çocuk kitabı temelli hazırlanan eğitim programının 5 yaş çocukların kelime dağarcığı üzerindeki etkisinin incelenmesidir. Araştırmanın türü nicel araştırma yöntemlerinden ön test-son test kontrol gruplu deneysel desen olarak belirlenmiştir. Araştırmanın bağımlı değişkeni okul öncesi eğitime devam eden 5 yaş çocuklarının kelime dağarcığı ve kelime kavrama gelişim düzeyi; bağımsız değişkeni ise resimli çocuk kitapları temelli hazırlanan kelime dağarcığı eğitim programıdır. Çalışma grubu 31 kız ve 46 erkek olmak üzere toplam 77 çocuktan oluşturulmuştur. 38 çocuk deney grubuna; 39 çocuk ise kontrol grubuna atanmıştır. Araştırmada veri toplama aracı olarak Peabody Resim Kelime Testi III kullanılmıştır. Kelime dağarcığını geliştirmeyi amaçlayan bir eğitim programı deney grubundaki çocuklara 20 gün boyunca uygulanmıştır. Araştırmadan elde edilen verilerin analizinde ise bağımsız örneklem t-test analizi uygulanmıştır. Araştırma sonuçları, 5 yaş grubu çocuklara uygulanan 365 Gün Öykü Serisi temelli programın çocukların kelime dağarcıklarını artırdığı, çocukların yeni ve nadir kullanılan kelimeleri ediniminde etkili olduğu sonucuna varılmıştır. Erken yıllardan itibaren kelime dağarcığını genişletmeye odaklı eğitim programlarının sistematik olarak uygulanması önerilmektedir.
... Picture books are well established to be more lexically diverse than other types of linguistic input that children may encounter. For example, picture books contain more unique words than child-directed speech (Hayes & Ahrens, 1988;Massaro, 2015Massaro, , 2017Montag et al., 2015). In line with these findings, recordings of caregivers and children interacting in book reading contexts indicate that linguistic input from shared book reading may be more lexically sophisticated than that of other contexts (Crain-Thoreson, et al., 2001;Salo, et al., 2016;Sosa, 2016;Weizman & Snow, 2001). ...
Substantial literature suggests that reading to children is positively associated with language outcomes, but the causal pathways are less well understood. One possibility is that reading to children promotes language input that is particularly useful for some aspects of language learning. To better understand the language that is produced during picture book reading, we built a sharable corpus of caregiver-child interactions during book reading recorded in homes. Caregivers overwhelmingly read the book text. However, books varied in the language they generated, with some books promoting more conversational turns and extra-textual language, while others promoted more overall words, unique words, and longer utterances. Relative to other conversational contexts, books generally generated overall more words, more lexically diverse talk, and longer utterances. We see different profiles of language generated during book reading that are all plausibly linked with language skills. If a causal pathway exists between shared book reading and language outcomes, a sensible candidate may be that reading provides a varied range of linguistic experiences.
... En los momentos de lectura las madres y los padres utilizan más variedad de vocabulario, nombran más objetos, y utilizan un lenguaje dirigido al bebé más complejo que en el juego y la hora de comer (e.g. Dowdal et al., 2020;Massaro, 2015;Montag, 2019;Poulin-Dubois et al., 1995;Sosa, 2016). Se ha establecido un vínculo entre la complejidad del lenguaje al que el bebé y niño/a son expuestos y su posterior comprensión y producción de frases (e.g. ...
Una actividad muy valorada durante la primera infancia es la lectura compartida. Sin embargo, pocas investigaciones analizan las interacciones con libros ilustrados antes del año de vida. El objetivo de este trabajo es describir y comparar los estilos de interacción de madres y sus bebés de 9 meses en el hogar en situaciones de lectura y rutinas cotidianas. Se filmaron y analizaron una rutina cotidiana (baño, juego o comida) y un momento de lectura compartida. Los resultados muestran que las madres presentan un estilo más dialógico durante la lectura y más directivo durante las actividades cotidianas. Los bebés realizan mayormente acciones manipulativas sobre los libros. Ante intervenciones maternas los pequeños responden de manera más contingente y convencional. Los resultados muestran que las madres tienen un rol significativo al estructurar las experiencias de lectura durante el primer año de vida, apoyando la recomendación de incrementar la lectura a edades tempranas.
... It continues to predict measures of academic achievement including reading, language arts, and spelling. Findings of Massaro (2015) and Singer (2010) indicate that by age three, a child from a less economically affluent family tends to use a more limited range of words in their monthly vocabulary compared to children from more economically stable families, observed over the same period. ...
Children under the age of five are exposed to several hazards in developing countries, such as poverty, inadequate housing, and unstimulating home environments, which have an adverse influence on their cognitive and socio-emotional development. Since learning during adulthood is influenced by earlier developmental stages, these formative years are crucial in shaping a successful adult life. Therefore, the study intends to investigate what causes some children to perform worse than other children of the same age. It utilises data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2017-18 of 4,043 children from Punjab, Pakistan. Binary Logistic Regression was used for analysis and it demonstrated a positive relationship between early child development, wealth, maternal education, and home stimulating activities with all three measures of child development which include child identification of alphabets, reading at least four popular words, and recognition of numbers or shapes. The result of the study suggests that it is an urgent need of the hour to focus to women’s education and take steps to mitigate poverty in order to enable parents to provide their children with a better learning environment. JEL Classification Codes: I250, H75, P36, J13.
... Picture books are well established to be more lexically diverse than other types of linguistic input that children may encounter. For example, picture books contain more unique words than child-directed speech (Hayes & Ahrens, 1988;Massaro, 2015Massaro, , 2017Montag, et al., 2015). Further, there is some evidence that the lexical diversity in picture books becomes part of the spoken input during the reading sessions. ...
Substantial literature suggests that reading to children is positively associated with language outcomes, but the causal pathways are less well understood. One possibility is that reading to children promotes language input that is particularly useful for some aspects of language learning. To better understand the language that is produced during picture book reading, we built a sharable corpus of caregiver-child interactions during book reading recorded in homes. Caregivers overwhelmingly read the book text. However, books varied in the language they generated, with some books promoting more conversational turns and extra-textual language, while others promoted more overall words, unique words, and longer utterances. Relative to other conversational contexts, books generally generated overall more words, more lexically diverse talk, and longer utterances. We see different profiles of language generated during book reading that are all plausibly linked with language skills. If a causal pathway exists between shared book reading and language outcomes, a sensible candidate may be that reading provides a varied range of linguistic experiences.
... This invites the opportunity to use more uncommon vocabulary items than would be invited via real-world observation. Prior studies have confirmed greater lexical richness (e.g., more rare words) in parental language input during book reading versus language input received through conversation (Massaro, 2015). ...
It is well attested that high socio‐economic status (SES) is associated with larger vocabulary size estimates in young children. This has led to growing interest in identifying associations and mechanisms that may contribute to this relationship. In this study, parent‐child reading behaviors were investigated in relation to vocabulary size in a large‐scale study of linguistically and socio‐economically diverse families. This study sampled 902 infants in Singapore, a multilingual society. Both single‐language (dominant and non‐dominant) and dual‐language vocabulary size estimates were obtained and related to family SES, demographic details, and home literacy activities. Results demonstrated that both single‐language (dominant and non‐dominant) and dual‐language infant vocabulary size estimates were predicted by parental education levels. Further analyses revealed that parent‐child book reading activities mediated the relationship between parental education and infant vocabulary size. Findings suggest that shared book reading may narrow effects of socio‐economic disparities on early language development.
Research Highlights
Socio‐economic status (SES) was examined in relation to infant vocabulary size in a linguistically and socio‐economically diverse setting.
Mediating effects of the home literacy environment on infant vocabulary size were measured.
Socio‐economic factors, notably parental education, had both direct and indirect effects on vocabulary size.
The home literacy environment mediated effects of SES on infant vocabulary size.
... Nous avons choisi d'inscrire l'enseignement du lexique dans l'étude longue de textes illustrés, issus de la littérature de jeunesse. Les résultats de plusieurs types d'études soutiennent cette option : les unes montrent que les albums incluent deux à trois fois plus de mots peu courants dans les conversations quotidiennes à la maison comme à l'école (Massaro, 2015 ;Nagy et Townsend, 2012 ;Sénéchal, 2000) ; les autres, que l'apprentissage d'un mot est plus facile quand il est présenté dans un contexte significatif, la probabilité de le mémoriser augmentant avec le nombre de rencontres Nagy, Herman et Anderson, 1985) ; d'autres encore, que les albums offrent des illustrations qui, représentant les expressions et les mots nouveaux, peuvent aider les jeunes enfants à déterminer leur sens en contexte (Ganea, Pickard et DeLoache, 2008). On a aussi régulièrement observé qu'entre 3 et 6 ans la lecture répétée d'une même histoire amplifie les effets d'apprentissage du lexique, l'énoncé entendu étant plus stable (Damhuis, Segers et Verhoeven, 2015 ;Snow, 1991). ...
... A children's book can be analyzed as a "language model" (Hoff, 2006) that enables children to develop their language skills with the help of a reading person. On the word level, analyses of linguistic corpora have demonstrated that children's books contain more diverse vocabulary than the language adults use in everyday situations with their children (called child-directed speech, CDS; Massaro, 2015;. More specifically, the texts in books for children aged birth to 6 years contain more unique words, so-called types, than CDS of adults talking to children in the same age range . ...
Shared reading research has become increasingly multidisciplinary and has incorporated a multitude of assessment methods. This calls for an interdisciplinary perspective on children’s shared reading experiences at home and at the child care center and their relationships to oral language development. Here, we first discuss Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006) regarding the relationship between shared storybook reading and oral language development. Second, we develop a framework for investigating effects of shared reading on language development in two important microsystems: the home literacy environment (HLE) and the child care literacy environment (CCLE). Zooming in on shared storybook reading as a proximal process that drives oral language development, we then develop a triad model of language learning through shared storybook reading that integrates approaches and evidence from educational psychology, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics. Our model describes characteristics of children, adults, and books, and how their interplay influences shared reading activities. Third, we discuss implications for the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, 2014) regarding the conceptualization of shared reading as an important source of oral language development. Finally, to facilitate integrated research designs that include the two most important microsystems, we provide a critical discussion of assessment methods used in research that investigates the HLE and the CCLE and relate them to the shared reading triad in our bioecological model of shared storybook reading. We conclude with directions for future research.
... Indeed, it has been noted that '[t]he relatively rich oral vocabulary of five-year-olds stands in contrast to the often-restricted vocabulary found in beginning reading texts' (Schaughency, Suggate & Reese, 2017, p. 111) and basal reading texts across grades 1-6 (Graves, Elmore & Fitzgerald, 2019). Children's literature, on the other hand, tends to have more extended vocabulary and does not necessarily fit neatly into a linear hierarchical sequence (Massaro, 2015). Indeed, in some circles, children's literature has begun to be treated with suspicion as misdirecting teachers from structured reading instruction. ...
The New Word Hunter project sought to engage families of Year 1 children with the aim of extending their vocabularies beyond everyday language. Early vocabulary development has been linked to later performance in reading comprehension, as well as to socioeconomic status. This project sought to recruit families from two diverse school communities as partners in encouraging their children to increase their lexical repertoires by providing them with vocabulary rich books, supplementary resources and advice. Utilising a pre-and post-test design with a treatment group and comparison group in each of two contrastive schools, the study investigated both receptive and expressive vocabulary performance, with a focus on words in the Tier-2 category, drawing on the work of Beck and McKeown. Initial assessment found unanticipated similarities in the performance of children from low and middle SES backgrounds, but differences related to language background and gender. Based on this assessment, we suggest that educators may be underestimating young children's receptive and expressive language competence. Findings of the comparative analysis of pre-and post-test results indicate that the intervention was effective in improving children's understanding of challenging words included in fictional and nonfiction texts provided in resource packs. However, this was only the case in one school, Pleasant Rise, which had a socially and culturally diverse community with a moderate level of disadvantage; it was not the case in Pelican Point, a school serving a highly disadvantaged community. In discussing the findings, we suggest there may be an interaction between teacher attitudes, family interventions and child outcomes, even when educators' pedagogy is not the focus of the interventions. Acknowledging limitations of the project, we propose that directly encouraging parents and carers to engage in vocabulary extension with their children, and providing high quality and engaging materials, is worth further attention.
... The more exposure to reading, the more likely children will succeed at developing language skills, at acquiring vocabulary and at developing awareness for reading skills (Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy, https://www.clel.org/about3; Massaro, 2012Massaro, , 2015. Benefits on young children's literacy development naturally come out of story time programs (Cooper, Capo, Mathes & Gray, 2007;Durham, beneficial to children exposed to that same second language at home or at school or to monolingual children who receive exposure to a new culture and language. ...
... The characteristics of many picture books make them ideally suited to serve as a catalyst for stimulating educator-infant interactions that can potentially facilitate infants' learning of language (vocabulary, grammatical complexity) and their learning through language, including how to make meaning from pictures and gain knowledge about the world (Montag, 2019;Muhinyi and Rowe, 2019;Noble et al., 2018). Compared with everyday child-directed speech, picture books contain more unusual and diverse vocabulary (Massaro, 2015;Montag et al., 2015), and more complex forms such as passive voice and relative clause structures (Cameron-Faulkner and Noble, 2013;Montag, 2019;Noble et al., 2018). The picture book itself thus plays a key role in the learning potential of shared reading. ...
Early childhood educators are encouraged to read with infants, yet little is known about the educator–infant book‐focused interactions that occur in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centres. This study provides a systematic linguistic analysis of the naturally occurring interactions between one focal child Charlie (aged 21 months and 13 days) and two of his educators, as they each engaged in shared reading with Charlie and one or more of his peers during a typical day in his infant room. While both educators engaged in shared reading for pedagogical purposes, the meanings realised in their talk differed in subtle ways, providing Charlie and his peers with tacit and sometimes contradictory messages about how to make meaning from words and pictures. One educator's proportionally greater use of mental processes and polar questions construed shared reading primarily as an interpretive activity, while the other educator's proportionally greater use of WH questions and directives construed shared reading primarily as an instructional activity. Differences were also observed in Charlie's verbal participation during the two shared readings. The findings reveal how educators, through their own talk, create particular contexts in which infants may or may not participate during shared reading experiences.
... For the most part, reading aloud generates positive associations with reading and with books. Research shows that reading aloud promotes language development and emergent literacy skills (Beck & McKeown, 2001;Lane & Wright, 2007;Roberts, 2008), which are crucial skills for children's achievement in school and life (Heath & Hogben, 2004;Kalmar, 2008;Massaro, 2015). Research has also shown that active reading aloud can support children's development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills (Keene & Zimmerman, 2007). ...
The aim of this study is to explore how different semiotic resources are
used and shaped by and within social interaction during read-aloud
situations between one parent and two children. The study is based on
multimodal interaction analysis and the data is based on six read-aloud
occasions with one parent and two children during a period of two
weeks. The point of departure is the interaction between the children,
the parent and the book, focusing on the semiotic resources the
participants use in relation to the reader’s performance and the
children’s identity production. The results highlight the impact of the
reader and the importance of the reader’s approach and skills. The
results also show that when children are asked to take part in
conversations and participate on their own terms, the read-aloud
occasion can offer a significant arena for children’s identity production.
... Indeed, research studying how parents speak in different contexts supports this conclusion; young children often show gains in vocabulary immediately following novel experiences such as trips to zoos (Benjamin, Haden, & Wilkerson, 2010;Borun, Chambers, Dritsas, & Johnson, 1997). Others have noted how picture books also provide an easy way for parents to expand contexts and topics (Massaro, 2015;Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015;Snow, 1983). Here we use picture books as our case example of how talk across varying contexts may enable parent talk to jump from one curve to another. ...
The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount of talk and the lexical diversity in that talk. There are disagreements in the literature whether amount or diversity is the more critical measure of the input. Here we analyze the properties of a large corpus (6.5 million words) of speech to children and simulate learning environments that differ in amount of talk per unit time, lexical diversity, and the contexts of talk. The central conclusion is that what researchers need to theoretically understand, measure, and change is not the total amount of words, or the diversity of words, but the function that relates total words to the diversity of words, and how that function changes across different contexts of talk.
... Other research has shown that fathers use more varied vocabulary and use more rare and abstract words with their children than mothers do (Pancsofar et al., 2010). This might hold in particular true for bookreading, as picture books use more complex words (Massaro, 2016) and parents tend to use more complex language when interacting with children around a book (Hoff, 2010; Scorsby & Martlew, 1991 ). Some of the literature suggests that during bookreading fathers use unique vocabulary and experiences that are not as contingent on what is in the book or what the child is doing or saying (Conner, Knight, & Cross, 1997; Pancsofar et al., 2010). ...
It is well known that reading aloud affects children’s language and literacy development.
Little is known though, about fathers reading to their children. This study
examined paternal and maternal bookreading frequency among 430 low-income
families and investigated whether paternal bookreading and maternal bookreading
predicted children’s early language and cognitive development and emergent literacy
skills. Results demonstrated that mothers read more frequently to their toddlers
than fathers but approximately 55% of fathers reported reading at least weekly to
their children. Paternal bookreading at 24 and 36 months significantly predicted
children’s language and cognitive skills at age 36 months as well as their book
knowledge at preK. Maternal bookreading was only a significant predictor of child
cognitive skills at 36 months.
Context: Numerous studies highlight the protective power of early parent-child interactions on language acquisition. In everyday life, shared book reading gives parents the greatest number of opportunities to support their child’s language development. However, despite existing recommendations on early literacy habits, many families are not familiar with children’s books. Because of their involvement in prevention, detection and intervention in case of language disorders, speech therapists are key to supporting parents with children's early literacy habits. Objective: In this study, we establish a picture of speech therapists’ knowledge of the use of children’s books to promote early childhood literacy in early language intervention. Methods: Speech therapists, working in France and taking care of children under 3 years old with language difficulties, completed a questionnaire assessing their sense of competency and their use of children’s books in session. Results: 173 speech therapists completed our questionnaire. The results show differences between the strategies used by speech therapists and the ones recommended in the literature. Conclusion: It reveals the necessity to help improve practices concerning children’s books in early intervention. In practice, it can help speech therapists support parents more efficiently in the shared reading habits.
Identifying the characteristics of hyperpartisan communication that make it so amenable to sharing is crucial to combating the spread of misinformation. We analyzed a corpus of hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan writing produced on internet forums and found that markers of spontaneous communication are strongly predictive of hyperpartisan speech, regardless of whether that speech is left- or right-leaning. The markers of spontaneous communication included swear words, discourse markers, local pronouns like I and you, and exclamation marks. This suggests that speakers in hyperpartisan online communities exploit linguistic resources, even those without overtly political or persuasive content, to engage readers through appeal to closeness and familiarity.
As written language contains more complex syntax than spoken language, exposure to written language provides opportunities for children to experience language input different from everyday speech. We investigated the distribution and nature of relative clauses in three large developmental corpora: one of child-directed speech (targeted at pre-schoolers) and two of text written for children – namely, picture books targeted at pre-schoolers for shared reading and children’s own reading books. Relative clauses were more common in both types of book language. Within text, relative clause usage increased with intended age, and was more frequent in nonfiction than fiction. The types of relative clause structures in text co-occurred with specific lexical properties, such as noun animacy and pronoun use. Book language provides unique access to grammar not easily encountered in speech. This has implications for the distributional lexical-syntactic features and associated discourse functions that children experience and, from this, consequences for language development.
This article studies the popular children’s book The Gruffalo (1999) written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Its popularity is attested to by the fact that the book has sold over 13.5 million copies and has been translated into more than 80 different languages. The question that this article seeks to address is, to what extent has the language and style of The Gruffalo played a part in these commercial and cultural achievements. The article primarily explores the phenomena of meter, rhyme, rhythm and lexical repetition from interrelated linguistic and stylistic perspectives. It also brings these findings into a dialogue with some of the precepts and principles from both classical rhetoric and modern orality theory, especially pertaining to memory and delivery. Having weighed the linguistic evidence, the supposition is put forward that it is highly probable that the motivated language choices that have been made by the author, and the way those choices have been arranged and deployed in the story, have played a substantial role in the book’s success.
Decoding a writing system is an impressive task requiring recognition of connections between printed symbols and the language they represent. Recognising the linguistic anchors for individual symbols is however not enough. Inferences are needed about unseen and often unstated encoding principles. This paper reviews task demands implicit in children’s books and find the models of orthographic learning in an Indic writing system must go beyond a focus on intra-symbol cues, the size of the symbol set, and the nature of sound-symbol mapping. The child-directed print corpus also shows a substantial demand for recognition of multimorphemic words. Since children encounter an ever-expanding variety of such words in the books they read, it is essential to mount systematic studies on morphological development. At a methodological level, this exploratory study shows the limitations of building models of literacy development when real world encounters with a writing system are not adequately taken into account.
Starting from a usage-based perspective of language acquisition, the present study investigates the occurrence of connectives in BasiLex, an 11.5 million word corpus of texts Dutch children encounter during the primary school years (grades 1–6). Specifically, we investigate how connective frequencies change across grades, how these changes reflect the theorized orders of connective acquisition in the work of Bloom et al. (1980) and Evers-Vermeul & Sanders (2009) , and we make a comparison with the frequencies of connectives in the adult written language corpus Celex. Briefly summarized, our findings show that the numbers of connectives increase sharply after grade 1 and then more steadily across grades 2 to 6; we see some reflection of the connective acquisition theory of Evers-Vermeul & Sanders in the connective frequencies in texts offered to children; and we see some remarkable similarities between connective frequencies in the adult corpus Celex as compared to connective frequencies in grade 1 and grade 6 texts in BasiLex. Our findings suggest that the written input offered to children harmonizes with theoretical approaches that emphasize the incremental growth of word knowledge in children as a function of exposure.
Preschool storytimes have been a standard public library offering for more than one hundred years.1 Most public libraries offer preschool storytimes several times per week and follow a familiar pattern of read-aloud stories intermixed with sing-alongs, action songs, and finger plays, frequently connected to a weekly theme. Planning for these weekly story-time sessions can take a significant amount of staff time, as staff choose a theme and then select relevant, age-appropriate, and appealing stories, songs, and activities to fill the time slot.In multibranch library systems, this planning is often replicated at each branch, as each youth services team prepares its own unique program offerings. In search of greater efficiency, some public library systems have experimented with other models of program planning, with planning being done centrally for the entire system or by several branches partnering to work together. Is there a single model of program planning that works best and that staff prefer?
Extensive experience in written language might provide children the opportunity to learn to read in the same manner they learn spoken language. One potential type of written language immersion is reading aloud to children, which is additionally valuable because the vocabulary in picture books is richer and more extensive than that found in child-directed speech. This study continues a comparison between these 2 communication media by evaluating their relative linguistic and cognitive complexity. Although reading grade level has been used only to assess the complexity of written language, it was also applied to both child-directed and adult-directed speech. Five measures of reading grade level gave an average grade level of 4.2 for picture books, 1.9 for child-directed speech, and 3.0 for adult-directed speech. The language in picture books is more challenging than that found in both child-directed and adult-directed speech. It is proposed that this difference between written and spoken language is the formal versus informal genre of their occurrence rather than their text or oral medium. The value of reading books aloud therefore exposes children to a linguistic and cognitive complexity not typically found in speech to children.
Large-scale standardised, early reading assessments abound at the international and national levels, but research into urgent problems facing practitioners remains scarce. Practice-inspired research involves university-researchers in partnership with teacher-researchers undertaking high-quality research to provide relevant and useful knowledge. Case studies of practice-inspired research of students beginning to read in schools within complex, diverse communities provided unexpected findings as well as innovative practices. The first study investigated the connections between oral language and early reading and revealed that contrary to teachers’ expectations, students’ oral language did not map neatly to early reading development. Oral language was, however, important in its own right for learning in school. The second study investigated a large number of struggling readers in a school within a low-income community. This research found an urgent need for flexible, one-to-one, reading interventions for previously overlooked readers who fall into the third quartile within classrooms.
Bookreading is known to benefit young children’s language and literacy development. However, research has demonstrated that how adults interact around a book with a child is probably even more important than reading the complete text. Dialogic or interactive reading strategies can promote children’s language development more specifically. Little is known about how fathers engage in bookreading with their children. This study examined the differences and similarities in interaction style during bookreading among low-income fathers and mothers in the US at child ages two and three, in particular focusing on immediate and non-immediate talk. Results demonstrated that fathers used more non-immediate talk, or talk not directly related to the book, than mothers did, at both child ages. Fathers also used more engagement strategies than mothers did.
There has been much discussion of the relationship between literacy and schooling. In these discussions, literacy, particularly in combination with schooling, is seen as an index and precipitator of intellectual development. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole challenge many of the generalizations made about the consequences of literacy and advocate examining the use of literacy in different social contexts. Through the observation of unschooled but literate adults, the Vai of Liberia, a people who have invented a syllabic writing system to represent their own language, Scribner and Cole consider the effects of becoming literate separately from the effects of attending school.
The goal of this chapter is to discuss persistent problems in the body of research on book sharing, and to point to potential solutions for future research. The chapter focuses on concerns that the author has not seen adequately addressed in previous critiques of book sharing research. This discussion covers 3 broad areas: (1) aspects of adult-child interaction during book sharing that have been ignored in previous research; (2) the need to consider various characteristics of the books that are shared during these interactions; and (3) aspects of the nature and timing of measurements used in book sharing research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Despite increased attention to methodological rigor in education research, the field has focused heavily on experimental design and not on the merit of replicating important results. The present study analyzed the complete publication history of the current top 100 education journals ranked by 5-year impact factor and found that only 0.13% of education articles were replications. Contrary to previous findings in medicine, but similar to psychology, the majority of education replications successfully replicated the original studies. However, replications were significantly less likely to be successful when there was no overlap in authorship between the original and replicating articles. The results emphasize the importance of third-party, direct replications in helping education research improve its ability to shape education policy and practice.
One hundred and ten English-speaking children schooled in French were followed from kindergarten to Grade 2 (Mage : T1 = 5;6, T2 = 6;4, T3 = 6;11, T4 = 7;11). The findings provided strong support for the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal & LeFevre, ) because in this sample the home language was independent of the language of instruction. The informal literacy environment at home predicted growth in English receptive vocabulary from kindergarten to Grade 1, whereas parent reports of the formal literacy environment in kindergarten predicted growth in children's English early literacy between kindergarten and Grade 1 and growth in English word reading during Grade 1. Furthermore, 76% of parents adjusted their formal literacy practices according to the reading performance of their child, in support of the presence of a responsive home literacy curriculum among middle-class parents.
Research on literacy development is increasingly making clear the centrality of oral language to long-term literacy development, with longitudinal studies revealing the continuity between language ability in the preschool years and later reading. The language competencies that literacy builds upon begin to emerge as soon as children begin acquiring language; thus, the period between birth and age three also is important to later literacy. Book reading consistently has been found to have the power to create interactional contexts that nourish language development. Researchers, pediatricians, and librarians have taken notice of the potential for interventions designed to encourage parents to read with their children. This article reviews research on the connections between language and later reading, environmental factors associated with language learning, and interventions developed in varied countries for encouraging book use by parents of young children.
From Preface and Introduction (chapter 1): A few years ago, we published a book about the transition from gesture to the first word, trying to show how linguistic and nonlinguistic symbols emerge through the interaction of more primitive cognitive systems (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, and Volterra, 1979). In this book we have moved a step further, tracking the passage from first words to grammar in another sample of healthy middle-class children. Once again, we have focused on the way a complex system emerges from simpler beginnings. In both works, we have argued that nature and children both create new machines out of old parts. The capacity to name things is built out of several nonlinguistic skills. The capacity to acquire grammar relies on a reworking of the same mechanisms that are used to build a lexicon. The emphasis in both cases is on continuity rather than discontinuity, construction rather than maturation.
Because they are not uncontroversial, the logical, methodological, and empirical underpinnings of this work need to be spelled out in more detail before we can proceed. These are covered in Chapters 2 (modularity hypothesis), 3 (correlational research in language development), and 4 (empirical groundwork for our current research in a review of the literature on individual differences in language development). This will lead directly into an overview of the design of our longitudinal study.
The next twelve chapters each contain one substudy within the structure of our longitudinal project. When this journey is complete, we will return to the issues outlined in Chapters 2 - 4, summarizing what individual differences in early language development have told us about language learning and the architecture of the Language Acquisition Device.
Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to adaptive success. This target article critically examines this "hierarchical prediction machine" approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency.
Understanding the determinants of socioeconomic status (SES) is an important economic and social goal. Several major influences on SES are known, yet much of the variance in SES remains unexplained. In a large, population-representative sample from the United Kingdom, we tested the effects of mathematics and reading achievement at age 7 on attained SES by age 42. Mathematics and reading ability both had substantial positive associations with adult SES, above and beyond the effects of SES at birth, and with other important factors, such as intelligence. Achievement in mathematics and reading was also significantly associated with intelligence scores, academic motivation, and duration of education. These findings suggest effects of improved early mathematics and reading on SES attainment across the life span.
The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational simulations and norming studies that corpus-based word frequencies systematically overestimate strengths of word representations, especially in the low-frequency range and in smaller-size vocabularies. Experience-driven differences in word familiarity prove to be faithfully captured by the subjective frequency ratings collected from responders at different experience levels. When matched on those levels, this lexical measure explains more variance than corpus-based frequencies in eye-movement and lexical decision latencies to English words, attested in populations with varied reading experience and skill. Furthermore, the use of subjective frequencies removes the widely reported (corpus) Frequency × Skill interaction, showing that more skilled readers are equally faster in processing any word than the less skilled readers, not disproportionally faster in processing lower frequency words. This finding challenges the view that the more skilled an individual is in generic mechanisms of word processing, the less reliant he or she will be on the actual lexical characteristics of that word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
The aim of the present study was to test a narrow interpretation of a Home Literacy Model whereby individual differences in child early literacy are best explained in terms of parent teaching behaviours rather than parent expectations and child interest. In the study, parents completed home literacy questionnaires, and 5-year-old children (N = 108) were assessed on measures of interest, alphabet knowledge, and emergent word reading. The results revealed that many parents reported that they adopted a very active didactic role in their young child's early literacy. Moreover, parents tended to have high expectations about their child's acquisition of literacy skills prior to Grade 1. It is important to note that parent teaching as well as parent expectations and child interest each explained unique variance in early literacy after controlling for socioeconomic status and child nonverbal intelligence. Hence, the explanatory power of the Home Literacy Model would be increased if it included parent expectations and child interest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Replication is one of the most important tools for the verification of facts within the empirical sciences. A detailed examination of the notion of replication reveals that there are many different meanings to this concept and the relevant procedures, but hardly any systematic literature. This paper analyzes the concept of replication from a theoretical point of view. It demonstrates that the theoretical demands are scarcely met in everyday work within the social sciences. Some demands are just not feasible, whereas others are constricted by restrictions relating to publication. A new classification scheme based on a functional approach that distinguishes between different types of replication is proposed. Next, it will be argued that replication addresses the important connection between existing and new knowledge. To do so it has to be applied explicitly and systematically. The paper ends with a description of procedures how this could be done and a set of recommendations how to handle the concept of replication in the future to exploit its potential to the full. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examines the longitudinal relations among early literacy experiences at home and children's kindergarten literacy skills, Grade 1 word reading and spelling skills, and Grade 4 reading comprehension, fluency, spelling, and reading for plea-sure. Ninety French-speaking children were tested at the end of kindergarten and Grade 1, and 65 were followed until the end of Grade 4. Parents reported in kinder-garten that storybook reading occurred frequently and that they sometimes taught their child to read words. The results of hierarchical regression analyses that con-trolled for parent education as well as concurrent and longitudinal relations among literacy behaviors reveal that parent teaching about literacy in kindergarten directly predicted kindergarten alphabet knowledge and Grade 4 reading fluency, whereas storybook exposure directly predicted kindergarten vocabulary and the frequency with which children reported reading for pleasure in Grade 4. Moreover, storybook exposure predicted Grade 4 reading comprehension indirectly. These findings extend the Home Literacy Model proposed by Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002). Powerful prescriptions for social policy require that models of reading acquisition be as comprehensive and accurate as possible. If the societal goal is to ensure that children quickly become able to read and understand texts fluently, then models of reading should include precise descriptions of the teaching methods that optimize learning, precise descriptions of the components that allow children to read flu-ently, and precise descriptions of the preparatory experiences and resources that SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING, 10(1), 59–87 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.
Given the value of face-to-face interaction in communication and learning, our persistent goal has been to develop, evaluate, and apply animated agents to produce realistic and accurate speech. We have implemented these agents as computer-assisted speech and language tutors for hard of hearing and autistic children, and other children with language challenges. Our language- training program utilizes conversational agents, who guide students through a variety of exercises designed to teach vocabulary and grammar, to improve speech articulation, and to develop linguistic and phonological awareness. We report a new experiment showing its effectiveness for school children learning English as a new language. Some of the advantages of this pedagogy and tech- nology include the popularity and effectiveness of computers and embodied conversational agents, the perpetual availability of the program, and individual- ized instruction. Animated tutors offer a promising approach to language learn- ing, human-machine interaction, and education.
Many studies have repeatedly shown an orthographic consistency effect in the auditory lexical decision task. Words with phonological rimes that could be spelled in multiple ways (i.e., inconsistent words) typically produce longer auditory lexical decision latencies and more errors than do words with rimes that could be spelled in only one way (i.e., consistent words). These results have been extended to different languages and tasks, suggesting that the effect is quite general and robust. Despite this growing body of evidence, some psycholinguists believe that orthographic effects on spoken language are exclusively strategic, post-lexical, or restricted to peculiar (low-frequency) words. In the present study, we manipulated consistency and word-frequency orthogonally in order to explore whether the orthographic consistency effect extends to high-frequency words. Two different tasks were used: lexical decision and rime detection. Both tasks produced reliable consistency effects for both low- and high-frequency words. Furthermore, in Experiment 1 (lexical decision), an interaction revealed a stronger consistency effect for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words, as initially predicted by Ziegler and Ferrand (1998), whereas no interaction was found in Experiment 2 (rime detection). Our results extend previous findings by showing that the orthographic consistency effect is obtained not only for low-frequency words but also for high-frequency words. Furthermore, these effects were also obtained in a rime detection task, which does not require the explicit processing of orthographic structure. Globally, our results suggest that literacy changes the way people process spoken words, even for frequent words.
Reading aloud to young children, particularly in an engaging manner, promotes emergent literacy and language development and supports the relationship between child and parent. In addition it can promote a love for reading which is even more important than improving specific literacy skills.21 When parents hold positive attitudes towards reading, they are more likely to create opportunities for their children that promote positive attitudes towards literacy and they can help children develop solid language and literacy skills. When parents share books with children, they also can promote children's understanding of the world, their social skills and their ability to learning coping strategies. When this message is supported by child health professionals during well child care and parents are given the tool, in this case a book, to be successful, the impact can be even greater. This effect may be more important among high risk children in low income families, who have parents with little education, belong to a minority group and do not speak English since they are less likely to be exposed to frequent and interactive shared reading.
In recent years there has been an increasing awareness that a comprehensive understanding of language, cognitive and affective processes, and social and interpersonal phenomena cannot be achieved without understanding the ways these processes are grounded in bodily states. The term 'embodiment' captures the common denominator of these developments, which come from several disciplinary perspectives ranging from neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology, and affective sciences. For the first time, this volume brings together these varied developments under one umbrella and furnishes a comprehensive overview of this intellectual movement in the cognitive-behavioral sciences. The chapters review current work on relations of the body to thought, language use, emotion and social relationships as presented by internationally recognized experts in these areas.
Inferencing is defined as 'the act of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true', and it is one of the most important processes necessary for successful comprehension during reading. This volume features contributions by distinguished researchers in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience on topics central to our understanding of the inferential process during reading. The chapters cover aspects of inferencing that range from the fundamental bottom up processes that form the basis for an inference to occur, to the more strategic processes that transpire when a reader is engaged in literary understanding of a text. Basic activation mechanisms, word-level inferencing, methodological considerations, inference validation, causal inferencing, emotion, development of inferences processes as a skill, embodiment, contributions from neuroscience, and applications to naturalistic text are all covered as well as expository text, online learning materials, and literary immersion.
It is now some twenty-five years since Literacy Studies took a new direction, turning away from questions of pedagogy and the psycholin-guistic processes of the individual reader–writer and looking outside the classroom to study literacy in its social context. Foundational works in this approach were Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words (Heath 1983) and Brian Street’s Literacy in Theory and Practice (Street 1984). Both studies memorably shifted the focus of literacy research onto domains and contexts beyond the classroom. Along with Scribner and Cole’s landmark Psychology of Literacy (Scribner &Cole 1981) which again emphasized the local and contextual practices by which literacy operates in social groups these are what Baynham (2004) calls the first-generation Literacy Studies. Second generation works such as Barton and Hamilton (1998), Besnier (1993), Kulick and Stroud (1993), Prinsloo and Breier (1996) developed these approaches in a series of significant empirical studies. In this book we ask what the future of Literacy Studies is, inviting a number of scholars actively involved in shaping the field of Literacy Studies both to take stock of the current state of activity and to point to future directions for literacy research. In doing so, this book provides an introduction to current third-generation empirical work which is pushing the boundaries of literacy research in a number of key directions: the focus has shifted from the local to the translocal, from print based literacies to electronic and multimedia literacies and from the verbal to the multimodal.
Success in school calls for using language in new ways to accomplish increasingly challenging discursive tasks across grade levels and school subjects. As children develop new knowledge, they also need support in using language in new ways. This introduction to the special issue offers insights into the challenges and affordances of developing academic language and suggests implications for pedagogy, teacher education, and further research.
This chapter emphasizes the multimodal nature of perception of spoken languages, as visual information from the speaker's face and lips provides visual help for both hearing and deaf listeners in disambiguating auditory messages. It presents results on the vocabulary development of hard-of-hearing children from use of a computer-based program which provides multimodal information along with assistance to teachers and therapists in designing activities for interactive training. © 2006 by Patricia Elizabeth Spencer and Marc Marschark. All rights reserved.
How Picturebooks Work is an innovative and engaging look at the interplay between text and image in picturebooks. The authors explore picturebooks as a specific medium or genre in literature and culture, one that prepares children for other media of communication, and they argue that picturebooks may be the most influential media of all in the socialization and representation of children. Spanning an international range of children's books, this book examine such favorites as Curious George and Frog and Toad Are Friends, along with the works of authors and illustrators including Maurice Sendak and Tove Jansson, among others. With 116 illustrations, How Picturebooks Work offers the student of children's literature a new methodology, new theories, and a new set of critical tools for examining the picturebook form.
On Reading Books to Children: Parents and Teachers brings together in one volume current research on adult book reading to children. The authors, drawn from around the world, are key researchers and eminent scholars from the fields of reading and literacy, child language, speech pathology, and psychology, representing multiple perspectives within these disciplines.
Chapters on the effects and limitations of book sharing are integrated with chapters discussing promising programs on storybook research. The reality of reading to children is more complex than it appears on the surface. The authors discuss some effects of and suggestions for reading to children that have emerged from the research. The ideas set forth in this volume will stimulate new lines of research on the effects of storybook reading, as well as refinements of current methods, yielding findings that enrich our understanding of this important arena of literacy development.
IntroductionWhat Does it Take to Learn a Word?The Evidence: The Evolution of infants' Word-to-World ExpectationsThe Evidence in ReviewConclusions
To clarify the role of decoding in reading and reading disability, a simple model of reading is proposed, which holds that reading equals the product of decoding and comprehension. It follows that there must be three types of reading disability, resulting from an inability to decode, an inability to comprehend, or both. It is argued that the first is dyslexia, the second hyperlexia, and the third common, or garden variety, reading disability.
John Hartley: Before Ongism: "To become what we want to be, we have to decide what we were" Orality & Literacy: The Technologization Of The Word Introduction Part 1: The orality of language 1. The literate mind and the oral past 2. Did you say 'oral literature'? Part 2: The modern discovery of primary oral cultures 1. Early awareness of oral tradition 2. The Homeric question 3. Milman Parry's discovery 4. Consequent and related work Part 3: Some psychodynamics of orality 1. Sounded word as power and action 2. You know what you can recall: mnemonics and formulas 3. Further characteristics of orally based thought and expression 4. Additive rather than subordinative 5. Aggregative rather than analytic 6. Redundant or 'copious' 7. Conservative or traditionalist 8. Close to the human lifeworld 9. Agonistically toned 10. Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced 11. Homeostatic 12. Situational rather than abstract 13. Oral memorization 14. Verbomotor lifestyle 15. The noetic role of heroic 'heavy' figures and of the bizarre 16. The interiority of sound 17. Orality, community and the sacral 18. Words are not signs Part 4: Writing restructures consciousness 1. The new world of autonomous discourse 2. Plato, writing and computers 3. Writing is a technology 4. What is 'writing' or 'script'? 5. Many scripts but only one alphabet 6. The onset of literacy 7. From memory to written records 8. Some dynamics of textuality 9. Distance, precision, grapholects and magnavocabularies 10. Interactions: rhetoric and the places 11. Interactions: learned languages 12. Tenaciousness of orality Part 5: Print, space and closure 1. Hearing-dominance yields to sight-dominance 2. Space and meaning 3. Indexes 4. Books, contents and labels 5. Meaningful surface 6. Typographic space 7. More diffuse effects 8. Print and closure: intertextuality 9. Post-typography: electronics Part 6: Oral memory, the story line and characterization 1. The primacy of the story line 2. Narrative and oral cultures 3. Oral memory and the story line 4. Closure of plot: travelogue to detective story 5. The 'round' character, writing and print Part 7: Some theorems 1. Literary history 2. New Criticism and Formalism 3. Structuralism 4. Textualists and deconstructionists 5. Speech-act and reader-response theory 6. Social sciences, philosophy, biblical studies 7. Orality, writing and being human 8. 'Media' versus human communication 9. The inward turn: consciousness and the text John Hartley: After Ongism: The Evolution of Networked Intelligence
discuss the distinction between logographic and alphabetic word reading / propose that children learn to read their first few words by selecting some attribute of each word that distinquishes it from the other words that they know / to be successful readers, . . . children must learn the alphabetic cipher / reading and spelling are fundamentally similar because knowledge of the cipher is at the heart of both skills (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The performance of 50 hearing-impaired students (aged 10–18 yrs) on the Vocabulary Comprehension subtest of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests was related to performance on a variety of criterion comprehension measures, including a cloze task and 4 question tasks. The question tasks varied in terms of lookback condition (lookback vs no-lookback) and response requirement (production vs recognition). To better describe the strength of lexical knowledge as a predictor of reading comprehension performance, comparisons between this variable and a global reading comprehension measure were explored. Results support the contention that lexical knowledge is an effective predictor of reading comprehension performance for hearing-impaired students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This technical report describes the implementation and use of ChildFreq, a tool for assessing lexical norms of children from one to seven years old. As the name implies, ChildFreq works by extracting word frequencies from a large corpus of child language. These can then be ordered by age or mean length of utterance, and it is also possible to split the data by the children's gender. A query of words to count the frequency of produces both a line chart and a table with more detailed information. The child language data is taken from the English part of the CHILDES database 1 and comprises more than 5,000 tran-scriptions,a total of ≈ 3, 500, 000 word tokens. The children's ages range from six months to seven years, with most children being three years old. ChildFreq is freely available online at http://childfreq.sumsar.net .
The child directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers was analyzed in terms of utterance-level constructions. First, the mothers’ utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh-questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers’ utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item-based phrases such as Are you …, I’ll …, It’s …, Let’s …, What did …. The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item-based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item-based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother’s frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item-based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them.
Natural conversations and popular television shows provide sufficient lexical diversity for children to develop novice levels of lexical expertise, but they are ill-suited for developing the higher levels of such expertise. In large part, this is due to distinct patterns of word choice in speaking and writing. Those patterns are revealed in a half-million word corpus, designed to represent all major language sources (print, television, and conversation). Each sample text is first compared against a common 10,000-type reference lexicon. This permits comparisons between texts from different language sources. The pattern of word choice in most printed texts is described by a simple linear equation, but conversations are fit by one or another cubic equation. Linear and S-curve texts differ in their relative use of the major articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and most other function words, as well as the more common and rarer content words. The ranking of the 10 most common function words is uncorrelated in the two patterns. Consequently, conversations between college graduates more closely resemble a preschool child's speech to its parents than texts from newspapers. Implications of the linear and S-curved patterns for models of lexical acquisition are considered.
A new corpus of spontaneous conversations between adults and children is examined for evidence that adults simplify their vocabulary choices when speaking with young children. If these simplifications are found to be age-dependent, then they would broaden the pattern of simplifications characteristic of ‘motherese’ to include lexical choice as well. For the age-range newborns to 12 years, the results are both consistent with and contrary to the attested set of grammatical simplifications. In this corpus, MLU and TTR are strongly age-dependent, but adults do not choose their words from the 10,000 most common word-types in English in an age-dependent manner. Rather, the additional types for school-aged children come from the same part of the vocabulary and share the same-shaped distributions as in adult speech with preschool children and infants. This absence of an age-dependent accommodation in word choice has implications for models of child lexical acquisition which assume adult language accommodation.
The hypothesis was tested that children whose families differ in socioeconomic status (SES) differ in their rates of productive vocabulary development because they have different language-learning experiences. Naturalistic interaction between 33 high-SES and 30 mid-SES mothers and their 2-year-old children was recorded at 2 time points 10 weeks apart. Transcripts of these interactions provided the basis for estimating the growth in children's productive vocabularies between the first and second visits and properties of maternal speech at the first visit. The high-SES children grew more than the mid-SES children in the size of their productive vocabularies. Properties of maternal speech that differed as a function of SES fully accounted for this difference. Implications of these findings for mechanisms of environmental influence on child development are discussed.
Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decision for late-acquired/high-frequency words (e.g. a psychologist responding to cognition) over late-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. a chemist responding to cognition), revealing a frequency effect when words are perfectly matched. However, contrary to theories that exclude AoA as a factor, performance was similar for the late-acquired/high-frequency and early-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. dragon) even though their cumulative frequencies differed by more than an order of magnitude. This last finding was replicated with geologists using geology words matched with early-acquired words in terms of concreteness (Experiment 2). Most interestingly, Experiment 3 yielded the same pattern of results in naming while controlling for imageability, a finding that is particularly problematic for parallel distributed processing models of reading.
Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech ('motherese') exhibits overemphasized acoustic properties which may facilitate the acquisition of phonetic categories by infant learners. It has been suggested that the use of infant-directed data for training automatic speech recognition systems might also enhance the automatic learning and discrimination of phonetic categories. This study investigates the properties of infant-directed vs. adult-directed speech from the point of view of the statistical pattern recognition paradigm underlying automatic speech recognition. Isolated-word speech recognizers were trained on adult-directed vs. infant-directed data sets and were tested on both matched and mismatched data. Results show that recognizers trained on infant-directed speech did not always exhibit better recognition performance; however, their relative loss in performance on mismatched data was significantly less severe than that of recognizers trained on adult-directed speech and presented with infant-directed test data. An analysis of the statistical distributions of a subset of phonetic classes in both data sets showed that this pattern is caused by larger class overlaps in infant-directed speech. This finding has implications for both automatic speech recognition and theories of infant speech perception.
Two studies were conducted to determine the extent to which young children fixate on the print of storybooks during shared book reading. Children's books varying in the layout of the print and the richness of the illustrations were displayed on a computer monitor. Each child's mother or preschool teacher read the books while the child sat on the adult's lap wearing an EyeLink headband that recorded visual fixations. In both studies, children spent very little time examining the print regardless of the nature of the print and illustrations. Although fixations on the illustrations were highly correlated with the length of the accompanying text and could be altered by altering the content of the text, fixations to the text were uncorrelated with the length of the text. These results indicate that preschool children engage in minimal exploration of the print during shared book reading.
- Oakhill J.