Picture book reading: Investigating a key source of linguistic input for early language development

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

In many homes, schools, and daycare settings, parents and other caregivers engage young children with picture books. This project examines how differences in home picture book reading practices accounts for individual differences in children's language development. This project also involves testing whether greater lexical and grammatical diversity (a characteristic of picture book reading) promote word learning. The text of picture books differs from typical child-directed speech in ways that may be important for language learning. For example, picture book text often describes people and entities not present in the here-and-now, and is characterized by narrative structures unlike typical speech. In addition, the text of picture books contains more unique words and a greater number of complex sentences than typical speech. This means that children who are often read picture books may hear words and sentences that they may not otherwise hear. This project will help researchers understand trajectories of language development and factors that contribute to language development for children. The results of this project will have implications for programs that aim to improve early language outcomes. This project tests the hypothesis that the distributional differences between child-directed speech and texts may explain the observed benefits of picture book reading. Given the systematic differences between the language contained in picture book text and typical child-directed speech, exposure to picture books may provide children with valuable language learning opportunities. To test this hypothesis, this project first aims to better understand what picture book reading looks like in naturalistic contexts in real homes. Large scale surveys about home reading practices will be administered to parents and primary caregivers. In addition, children and caregivers will be recorded during picture book reading in order to collect data about caregiver-child interactions. Next, families will be given sets of simple or complex picture books to read at home, in order to manipulate the language input that children experience. This manipulation of the language input will provide a means by which the researchers can examine the longitudinal effects of picture book reading on vocabulary and other language outcomes. Given that picture book text is characterized by greater contextual and syntactic diversity than typical speech, this project will demonstrate whether these attributes make picture books a particularly good or poor word-learning tool for children. The results of this project will advance the understanding of the role language input plays in language development, and will clarify the manner in which picture books contribute to language learning trajectories. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.