The Effect of Shared Reading on Vocabulary Acquisition in Infants: are Words Learned Earlier when Present in Children’s Books?
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2024-10-17
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en
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Previous research has found that shared reading has a positive effect on the language acquisition of children. In the present study, we further investigated why that effect might occur. The hypothesis was that this might be because of the repetitive nature of children’s books and the variety of words appearing in books. We approximated the age of acquisition from CDI data from 2840 Dutch-learning children. We also identified which words appeared in the most popular Dutch children’s books, controlling for the frequency of the words with OpenSoNaR+ database, and word type (noun, verb, other). Finally, we calculated the age of acquisition for each word for boys and girls separately. Our results show that when words appear in books, they are learned earlier. Nouns which appear in books also had an earlier age of acquisition than nouns which did not appear in books. This effect was minimal for verbs. Finally, we found that girls learn words which do not appear in books earlier than boys, which is consistent with previous research. However, with words that do appear in books, the different is minimal between boys and girls. This study shows general support for the positive effect of reading to young children.
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