The differential effect of storybook reading on preschoolers' acquisition of expressive and receptive vocabulary

The present study was conducted to assess the effect of didactic techniques used during storybook reading on young children's acquisition of new vocabulary introduced in storybooks. Thirty children for each group of three- and four-year-old children were read one storybook individually. The study included three storybook reading conditions: single-reading, repeated-reading and questioning. In both the repeated-reading and the questioning conditions, the storybook was read three times. Children in the questioning condition were asked, during each reading of the storybook, to label target items with the novel words. Listening to multiple readings of a storybook facilitated children's acquisition of expressive and receptive vocabulary, whereas answering questions during the multiple readings was more helpful to the acquisition of expressive than receptive vocabulary. These findings suggest that, under certain conditions, didactic techniques used by adults have differential effects on preschoolers' receptive and expressive vocabulary.     

Joint book reading as a multiple vocabulary acquisition device.

Investigated serial effects in recurrent ostensive definitions of words in the context of joint picture-book reading by 20 mother–infant (aged 17–22 mo) dyads. Content analysis revealed a number of labeling formats, among them simple labeling by the mother or by the infant, elicitation of labeling by "what" questions, elicitation of pointing by "where" questions, and elicited and spontaneous imitation by the infant. The dyads applied a mixture of labeling formats to the same referent on its successive occurrences. Imitation was more likely following previous error in labeling than were correct labeling and pointing by the infant. Mothers tended to follow errors and no responses with simple labeling of the same referent on its next appearance, whereas they followed correct responses with attempts to elicit labeling or pointing from the infant. Results imply that imitation, comprehension, and productive responses to words by vocabulary-learning infants do not represent different levels of word knowledge and that the respective vocabularies are overlapping at a given point in time. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences for self-regulating task-oriented reading activities.

The goal of this study is to analyze the self-regulation processes present in task-oriented reading activities. In the 1st experiment, we examined the following self-regulation processes in the context of answering questions about an available text: (a) monitoring the comprehension of the question, (b) self-regulating the search process, and (c) monitoring the decision to search. Skilled and less skilled comprehenders from 7th and 8th grades read 2 texts and answered 16 questions while all their actions were recorded on a computer. We hypothesized that skilled comprehenders would differ from less skilled comprehenders on the 1st 2 processes on the basis of their general comprehension skills but that their superiority in the 3rd process would be based on specific characteristics of the interaction between the reader and the text. The results support our hypotheses. In the 2nd experiment, we hypothesized that monitoring the decision to search would be equivalent to judgments of learning (JOLs). Eighth graders made JOLs before answering every question, and then they decided whether to search the text. Our hypothesis was confirmed. Our study reveals that task-oriented reading places specific demands on readers related to metacognitive monitoring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in distraction by pictures in a reading situation.

Determined whether the relative difficulty of the words being read influences the extent to which good, normal, and poor readers' decoding is susceptible to influence by adjunct pictures. 48 3rd graders were required to read easy, moderate, and difficult 1-syllable nouns under each of 3 conditions: a control condition with no pictures, an identifying-picture condition, and an unrelated-picture condition. The reading performance of poor readers as a group was influenced by pictures under all conditions, while that of normal and good readers was much less affected by them. There were, however, marked individual differences among the poor readers in the degree of their susceptibility to distraction. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in the acquisition of affectively valenced associations

Two studies were conducted to test the predictions derived from the behavioral activation system and behavioral inhibition system theory of personality that trait anxiety is positively related to the speed of acquisition of punishment expectancies and impulsivity is positively related to the speed of acquisition of reward expectancies. Both studies used a standard approach-avoidance discrimination task with self-report measures of expectancies. Both studies found support for the hypothesized relation between trait and acquisition of punishment expectancies but not for the hypothesized relation between impulsivity and acquisition of reward expectancies. Study 2 suggested that the relation between trait anxiety and punishment expectancy is affected by the type of incentive and the type of trait anxiety measure used. The results suggest that highly trait anxious individuals are more susceptible to developing new sources of anxiety than others.     

Individual differences in children's event memory reports and the narrative elaboration technique.

Children between 7 and 8 years old took pan in a staged event at school and 1 week later were assessed using a short form of the Wechsler Intelligence scale for children (third edition) and measures of metamemory, narrative ability, and socioeconomic status. Two weeks following the event, children either received narrative elaboration training (NET; K.J. Saywitz & L. Snyder, 1996) and were prompted with the four NET cue cards at interview; received verbal prompts corresponding to the cue card categories, but without prior training; or were presented with the cards at interview without prior training. Children given verbal labels as prompts recalled as much information as children who received NET training and cue cards. Measures of intelligence were predictive of amount recalled for cards-only children but not for the other 2 groups, indicating that differences in recall between low- and high-IQ groups were attenuated when recall was supported by NET training or verbal prompting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in information integration during moral judgment.

Tested an ethical ideologies model based on relativism and idealism. 64 undergraduates judged the morality of an individual who produced a mildly or extremely positive or negative consequence by conforming to or violating a common moral norm. As predicted, an averaging model with differential weights accounted for situationists' (high relativism and idealism) and absolutists' (low relativism and high idealism) judgments; conformity to norms was discounted when the consequence was extremely negative or positive. In contrast, subjectivists' (high relativism and low idealism) judgments conformed to an averaging model; a mildly positive consequence lowered moral judgments of conforming actions, whereas a mildly negative consequence tended to raise moral judgments of nonconforming actions. Exceptionists' (low relativism and idealism) judgments were influenced equally by conformity and consequence. These Ss generally combined data in a strictly linear, additive fashion. The more positive the consequence or the greater the conformity of the action to a moral norm, the more positive was the moral judgment. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in schema utilization during discourse processing.

Discourse processing involves an interaction of text-based and knowledge-based processes. It was hypothesized that college students (N?=?112) would differ in their relative employment of knowledge-based processes, and that Ss would tend to be more "text bound" when they were more "stimulus bound" in another task with analogous processing demands (i.e., an embedded figures test; EFT). Extent of knowledge-based processing (or schema utilization) was assessed by comparing recall of food items from a narrative about a trip to a fancy restaurant with that from a parallel narrative about a trip to a supermarket. Previous research has demonstrated that since the "foods purchased" component of the restaurant schema is more highly constrained than the equivalent component of the supermarket schema, the former supports greater food item recall. As predicted, food item recall was significantly positively correlated with EFT residuals (after predicting EFT from vocabulary test scores) for the restaurant condition, with no correlation for the supermarket control. Other dependent measures yielded the same pattern of positive correlation with EFT or no correlation with EFT as a function of whether performance would be enhanced by schema utilization or not, respectively. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of children's moral sensibility: Individual differences and emotion understanding.

Developmental changes and individual differences in children's conceptions of transgressions were studied in 46 children in their kindergarten and 1st-grade years; the children had previously been studied with their mothers and siblings as 2- and 3-year-olds. Differences in responses to moral transgressions in kindergarten were related to mothers' control management and to siblings' friendly behavior in the preschool period, early understanding of emotions, and verbal ability. Family variables and emotion understanding were also correlated with responses to moral transgressions in 1st grade. The incidence of children's attribution of happiness or mixed feelings to victimizers did not change between 6 and 7 years. The findings suggest experiences with both mothers and siblings, and differences in how children assess the feelings of others show consistent and comparatively long-term associations with children's responses to moral issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the perceptual span during reading.

Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N + 2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N + 2 or word N + 2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N + 1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N + 2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N + 2 preview both for young and for old adults, with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N + 1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of verbal and nonverbal references to print on preschoolers' visual attention to print during storybook reading.

How much do preschool children look at print within storybooks when adults read to them? This study sought to answer this question as well as to examine the effects of adult verbal and nonverbal references to print on children's visual attention to print during storybook reading. Forty-four preschool-aged children participated in this study designed to determine the amount of visual attention children paid to print in 4 planned variations of storybook reading. Children's visual attention to print was examined when adults commented and questioned about print (verbal print condition) or pointed to and tracked the print (nonverbal print condition), relative to 2 comparison conditions (verbatim reading and verbal picture conditions). Results showed that children rarely look at print, with about 5%-6% of their fixations allocated to print in verbatim and verbal picture reading conditions. However, preschoolers' visual attention to print increases significantly when adults verbally and nonverbally reference print; both reading styles exerted similar effects. The authors conclude that explicit referencing of print is 1 way to increase young children's contacts with print during shared storybook reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical output as related to children's vocabulary acquisition: Effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning.

A corpus of nearly 150,000 maternal word-tokens used by 53 low-income mothers in 263 mother–child conversations in 5 settings (e.g., play, mealtime, and book readings) was studied. Ninety-nine percent of maternal lexical input consisted of the 3,000 most frequent words. Children's vocabulary performance in kindergarten and later in 2nd grade related more to the occurrence of sophisticated lexical items than to quantity of lexical input overall. Density of sophisticated words heard and the density with which such words were embedded in helpful or instructive interactions, at age 5 at home, independently predicted over a third of the variance in children's vocabulary performance in both kindergarten and 2nd grade. These two variables, with controls for maternal education, child nonverbal IQ, and amount of child's talk produced during the interactive settings, at age 5, predicted 50% of the variance in children's 2nd-grade vocabulary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facilitating children's syntax acquisition.

Investigated how adults assist children's acquisition of new syntactic forms. In this 2-mo study, when 12 21/2-yr-olds produced sentences, adults gave replies designed to speed acquisition of particular kinds of sentence structures that were lacking before intervention. Children received intervention that was selectively directed toward acquisition either of question forms or of verb forms. The impact of intervention also was selective. Ss who encountered verb intervention sessions acquired new forms of questions. This evidence appears to provide the 1st demonstration that adults' verbal interventions with children who are learning a first language can lead the children to acquire particular syntactic forms that they lacked before intervention. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in reading to summarize expository text: Evidence from eye fixation patterns.

Eye fixation patterns were used to identify reading strategies of adults as they read multiple-topic expository texts. A clustering technique distinguished 4 strategies that differed with respect to the ways in which readers reprocessed text. The processing of fast linear readers was characterized by the absence of fixations returning to previous text. Slow linear readers made lots of forward fixations and reinspected each sentence before moving to the next. The reading of nonselective reviewers was characterized by look backs to previous sentences. The distinctive feature of topic structure processors was that they paid close attention to headings. They also had the largest working-memory capacity and wrote the most accurate text summaries. Thus, qualitatively distinct reading strategies are observable among competent, adult readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reinforcement potency of children's reading materials.

Two related experiments investigated the reinforcement potency of children's reading materials. In Exp I, 96 3rd graders demonstrated a listening preference, overall, for heritage, contemporary, and McGuffey materials in that order. In Exp II, listening to tapes of the materials was used as a reward for correct responses on individualized reading exercises. 196 3rd graders were randomly assigned to 5 groups: 3 reinforcement groups, a no-listening control, and a no-intervention control. Listening served as a reinforcer. While individual preferences had an initial effect, the final measure showed the heritage literature to be the most potent, then contemporary, and then McGuffey. The heritage group performed significantly better on a standardized reading achievement test (Science Research Associates Primary II Reading Achievement Test, Forms F and E). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stages in Chinese children's reading of English words.

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggest that Chinese children follow stages in alphabetic reading development similar to those of native English-speaking children: the prealphabetic stage, the partial alphabetic stage, and the full alphabetic stage. The use of orthographic analogy does not form a separate stage independent of the alphabetic decoding stages; rather, it is a concurrent option available to Chinese children from an early age. Children more readily made onset-vowel analogies than vowel-coda analogies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)