# AN OPEN BOOK: WHAT AND HOW YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN FROM PICTURE AND STORY BOOKS

EDITED BY: Jessica S. Horst and Carmel Houston-Price PUBLISHED IN: Frontiers in Psychology

#### *Frontiers Copyright Statement*

*© Copyright 2007-2016 Frontiers Media SA. All rights reserved. All content included on this site, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, video/audio clips, downloads, data compilations and software, is the property of or is licensed to Frontiers Media SA ("Frontiers") or its licensees and/or subcontractors. The copyright in the text of individual articles is the property of their respective authors, subject to a license granted to Frontiers.*

*The compilation of articles constituting this e-book, wherever published, as well as the compilation of all other content on this site, is the exclusive property of Frontiers. For the conditions for downloading and copying of e-books from Frontiers' website, please see the Terms for Website Use. If purchasing Frontiers e-books from other websites or sources, the conditions of the website concerned apply.*

*Images and graphics not forming part of user-contributed materials may not be downloaded or copied without permission.*

*Individual articles may be downloaded and reproduced in accordance with the principles of the CC-BY licence subject to any copyright or other notices. They may not be re-sold as an e-book.*

*As author or other contributor you grant a CC-BY licence to others to reproduce your articles, including any graphics and third-party materials supplied by you, in accordance with the Conditions for Website Use and subject to any copyright notices which you include in connection with your articles and materials.*

> *All copyright, and all rights therein, are protected by national and international copyright laws.*

*The above represents a summary only. For the full conditions see the Conditions for Authors and the Conditions for Website Use.*

ISSN 1664-8714 ISBN 978-2-88919-728-6 DOI 10.3389/978-2-88919-728-6

## About Frontiers

Frontiers is more than just an open-access publisher of scholarly articles: it is a pioneering approach to the world of academia, radically improving the way scholarly research is managed. The grand vision of Frontiers is a world where all people have an equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge. Frontiers provides immediate and permanent online open access to all its publications, but this alone is not enough to realize our grand goals.

## Frontiers Journal Series

The Frontiers Journal Series is a multi-tier and interdisciplinary set of open-access, online journals, promising a paradigm shift from the current review, selection and dissemination processes in academic publishing. All Frontiers journals are driven by researchers for researchers; therefore, they constitute a service to the scholarly community. At the same time, the Frontiers Journal Series operates on a revolutionary invention, the tiered publishing system, initially addressing specific communities of scholars, and gradually climbing up to broader public understanding, thus serving the interests of the lay society, too.

## Dedication to Quality

Each Frontiers article is a landmark of the highest quality, thanks to genuinely collaborative interactions between authors and review editors, who include some of the world's best academicians. Research must be certified by peers before entering a stream of knowledge that may eventually reach the public - and shape society; therefore, Frontiers only applies the most rigorous and unbiased reviews.

Frontiers revolutionizes research publishing by freely delivering the most outstanding research, evaluated with no bias from both the academic and social point of view. By applying the most advanced information technologies, Frontiers is catapulting scholarly publishing into a new generation.

## What are Frontiers Research Topics?

Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
## **AN OPEN BOOK: WHAT AND HOW YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN FROM PICTURE AND STORY BOOKS**

Topic Editors: **Jessica S. Horst,** University of Sussex, United Kingdom **Carmel Houston-Price,** University of Reading Malaysia, Malaysia

Image by Jessica Horst.

Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, frequently enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children's general knowledge, understanding about the world and promotes language acquisition. This collection of papers demonstrates the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and increases our understanding of the social and cognitive mechanisms that support this learning. Our hope is that this Research Topic/eBook will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children's learning.

**Citation:** Horst, J. S., Houston-Price, C., eds. (2016). An Open Book: What and How Young Children Learn From Picture and Story Books. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88919-728-6

# Table of Contents

*118 Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children's knowledge about animals*

Patricia A. Ganea, Caitlin F. Canfield, Kadria Simons-Ghafari and Tommy Chou

Philippa Heath, Carmel Houston-Price and Orla B. Kennedy

Lucia M. Flevares and Jamie R. Schiff

Toshiki Murase

Kohei Tsunemi, Ayana Tamura, Shino Ogawa, Tomoko Isomura, Hiroyasu Ito, Misako Ida and Nobuo Masataka

## Editorial: An Open Book: What and How Young Children Learn from Picture and Story Books

Jessica S. Horst 1 \* and Carmel Houston-Price2

*1 School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, 2 School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading Malaysia, Nusajaya, Malaysia*

Keywords: storybook attributes, word learning, stereotypes, anthropomorphism, cross-cultural comparisons

Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, frequently enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children's general knowledge, understanding about the world, and promotes language acquisition. This collection of papers demonstrates the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and increases our understanding of the social and cognitive mechanisms that support this learning. Our hope is that this Research Topic/eBook will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children's learning.

We conceptually divide this research topic into four broad sections, which focus on the nature and attributes of picture and story books, what children learn from picture and story books, the interactions children experience during shared reading, and potential applications of research into shared reading, respectively.

#### Edited and reviewed by: *Natasha Kirkham, Cornell University, USA*

\*Correspondence: *Jessica S. Horst<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

*This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

Received: *04 September 2015* Accepted: *26 October 2015* Published: *10 November 2015*

#### Citation:

*Horst JS and Houston-Price C (2015) Editorial: An Open Book: What and How Young Children Learn from Picture and Story Books. Front. Psychol. 6:1719. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01719* ATTRIBUTES OF PICTURE AND STORY BOOKS

The first section of this research topic focuses on the nature and structural attributes of picture and story books that influence the benefits of shared book reading. Three papers report empirical studies exploring how changes in story book attributes influence adult interaction style and child recall of story content (Greenhoot et al., 2014; Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014; Read, 2014). Greenhoot et al. (2014) examine the effect of storybook illustrations. Specifically, they gave parents either illustrated or non-illustrated stories to read with their 3–4-year-old children. Illustrated stories lead to more verbal and non-verbal exchanges between parents and children during shared reading and better recall of the story events by children. Nyhout and O'Neill (2014) explore the impact of narrative structure on book reading style. Parents read picture books to their 21-month-old children that either included contextual illustrations (narrative) or decontextualized illustrations (non-narrative). Although the two types of books elicited the same number of natural facts about animals overall, mothers reading narrative books provided more story-specific statements about the animals while mothers reading non-narrative books provided more labels and physical descriptions of animals. Finally, Read (2014) examined the effect of rhyme on children's learning of names for novel monsters. Two- to four-year-old children heard stories where either monster names did not rhyme with a descriptive feature, or where the name occurred before the feature (nonpredictive rhyme) or after the feature (predictive rhyme). Children identified significantly more monsters by name if the names followed a predictive rhyme. Together, this sub-collection of papers demonstrates the dramatic influence picture and storybook attributes can have on parent reading behavior and children's learning.

The next two papers present cross-cultural comparisons of the messages conveyed by storybooks (Suprawati et al., 2014; Vander Wege et al., 2014). Suprawati et al. (2014) compared the nature of the challenges faced by protagonists in story books published in Indonesia, Japan and the United States, along with how these challenges were resolved. Japanese stories contained the largest number of challenges, and a greater proportion of challenges that were resolved by the protagonist alone compared to American stories. In a similar vein, Vander Wege et al. (2014) coded the illustrations of books published in Romania, Turkey and the United States for the depiction of emotional expressions. As predicted by cultural norms, American books showed more intense emotional reactions—especially negative expressions. These studies reveal that story books reflect (and may also teach children about) the values of one's cultural group.

The final two papers in this section consider the methods used by researchers to establish which features of story books best support learning. Wagner (2013) provides an opinion piece arguing for the need of a quantitative database of the content of children's books. She explains how such a database could be used to support theoretical claims about the content of picture books and to identify testable hypotheses about the features that help children learn to retell stories. A second methodological paper, by Burris and Brown (2014), reviews the external validity of narrative comprehension assessments, drawing particular attention to research with children from low-SES and minority populations. They argue that researchers should test comprehension using real-time, on-line assessments during the story reading (e.g., think-aloud protocols, probe questions), as well as off-line assessments of children's comprehension (e.g., free recall, cued recall and story retelling).

## LEARNING FROM PICTURE AND STORY BOOKS

The next section in the series focuses on what children learn from storybooks. Three papers focus specifically on word learning (Houston-Price et al., 2014; Khu et al., 2014; Williams and Horst, 2014) and a further six focus on how shared book reading supports developments in children's understanding of people (Abad and Pruden, 2013; Golos and Moses, 2013), animals (Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014), food (Heath et al., 2014), and even geometry concepts (Flevares and Schiff, 2014). Khu et al. (2014) demonstrate that teaching 21-month-old toddlers the name of a novel object through a picture book facilitates their ability to learn objects' non-obvious properties (e.g., lighting-up with applied pressure; introduced through a second picture book). Houston-Price et al. (2014) found that both 4- and 6-year-olds were able to provide accurate definitions of new words introduced in stories, but that only the older group formed lexical representations that enabled them to make correct grammaticality judgments about these words. By reading stories immediately before nap time, Williams and Horst (2014) were able to explore the added benefit of sleep on word learning from story books in a preschool sample. Together, these papers add to the literature demonstrating that children acquire new vocabulary knowledge through picture and storybooks (see also Read, 2014) and further elucidate the extent and depth of the knowledge gained.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org November 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1719

The next two papers present opinions on how story book characters can help change children's stereotypes. First, Abad and Pruden (2013) synthesize what we know about the influence of story books whose characters engage in atypical gender behavior on children's subsequent play. The authors argue that story books provide a practical (and inexpensive) method for influencing gender stereotypes in a positive way. Golos and Moses (2013) take a similar approach to examining children's perceptions of deaf characters. In addition to reviewing how story books can help present the Deaf community positively, Golos and Moses make recommendations about the quality of the story line required if story books are to captivate and engage children.

The next pair of papers examines the effects of anthropomorphism in story books (Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014). In Ganea et al. (2014), 3–5-year-olds were read books with either anthropomorphic or realistic illustrations and either anthropomorphized or factual language. Both anthropomorphic illustrations and language lead to lower levels of learning, especially for the youngest children. In Waxman et al. (2014), 5-year-old children listened to a book about bears before completing a reasoning task. Children who read a book depicting bears scientifically (e.g., Animal Encyclopedia) generalized properties from one animal to another in the reasoning task (a biological perspective), while those who read a book depicting bears anthropomorphically (e.g., The Berenstain Bears) did not. Note, the stories used by Nyhout and O'Neill (2014) and Greenhoot et al. (2014) also included animals.

The final pair of papers in this section branch out to explore how story books can be used to change children's perceptions of food and mathematics (Heath et al., 2014). Heath et al. (2014) report that looking at picture books about an unfamiliar vegetable with toddlers encourages them to eat the vegetable when it is later offered at a mealtime. The effect was largest for foods that were unfamiliar to children before they saw the books. Heath et al. suggest that picture books might help more broadly to familiarize children with situations that they might otherwise reject. Flevares and Schiff (2014) undertake a chronological review of the evolution of different perspectives on the role of books in supporting school-aged children's learning of mathematical concepts, such as plane geometry. They explore the benefits of using picture-based literature for children's learning of and motivation to engage with mathematics concepts, and for the training of teachers in the delivery of these concepts.

## INTERACTIONS BETWEEN READERS AND READING MATERIAL

The third section in the series focuses on how children and parents interact with the story and each other during shared reading situations. Two papers in this section focus on the reading behaviors of middle-class African American (Harris and Rothlein, 2014) and Japanese (Murase, 2014) mothers. Harris and Rothlein (2014) found large individual differences in

mothers' reading styles. However, the most common narrativeeliciting strategies included questions about the characters and refocusing statements (e.g., directing the child to look back at the illustration). Murase's (2014) 7-month longitudinal study of maternal reading behavior found that mothers initially focus on providing information to children and that they display more requests for information over time. The number of informationseeking requests by mothers was positively correlated with children's productive vocabularies. In the next paper, Kucirkova (2013) reviews how children interact with iPad books, which she suggests offer a useful tool for examining how children engage with stories. Kucirkova also highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the learning opportunities provided by children's increasing experiences with digital media.

## INTERVENTIONS USING STORY BOOKS

The final section of the series takes a more applied angle. Two papers (Adlof et al., 2014; Tsunemi et al., 2014) present preliminary data from interventions using story books that show promise in helping children improve key skills. Adlof et al. (2014) confirmed the feasibility of a new intervention for low-SES children: structured narrative retell instruction (SNRI). In a group intervention, clinicians asked children questions about each component of the narrative (e.g., the characters) after each reading. Children who completed the intervention showed improvements in narrative macrostructure (including the total number and diversity of the words they used and their mean length of utterance) and overall vocabulary scores. Tsunemi et al.'s (2014) intervention aimed to help school-aged children

## REFERENCES

with autism improve their social perspective-taking skills. Parents read narrative books to their children for almost a week and asked questions about the mental states of the characters after each reading. Children in the intervention group improved in their ability to take second- and third-person perspectives in a social perspective-taking task. Together, this pair of feasibility studies suggests that narrative storybooks provide a suitable medium for a range of interventions to support children's development.

## CONCLUSIONS

The goal of this Research Topic was to foster an interdisciplinary exchange of the methods that have been used to uncover how and what young children learn from books and the knowledge that this work has revealed. The final collection of articles has exceeded our expectations in regard to its breadth of offering, including work by researchers from fields comprising communication science, education, linguistics, psychology and speech and language disorders. The volume provides an eclectic but complementary overview of the current state of research on the status of picture and story books in young children's development. Our reading of this literature is that books are a powerful and somewhat unharnessed resource that could be employed to a much greater extent to help children to engage with and make sense of the world around them.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION

Both JH and CH wrote the editorial and determined the groups of articles into the four categories presented in the editorial.

of social perspective-taking in schoolchildren with autism. Front. Psychol. 5:2. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00002

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2015 Horst and Houston-Price. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

## More than pretty pictures? How illustrations affect parent-child story reading and children's story recall

#### *Andrea Follmer Greenhoot 1 \*, Alisa M. Beyer 2 and Jennifer Curtis 1*

*1 Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA*

*2 Department of Psychology, Northern Arizona University, Yuma, AZ, USA*

#### *Edited by:*

*Carmel Houston-Price, University of Reading, UK*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Kirsten Read, Santa Clara University, USA Jennifer M. Zosh, Pennsylvania*

*State University, Brandywine, USA*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Previous research showed that story illustrations fail to enhance young preschoolers' memories when they accompany a pre-recorded story (e.g., Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). In this study we tested whether young children might benefit from illustrations in a more interactive story-reading context. For instance, illustrations might influence parent-child reading interactions, and thus children's story comprehension and recall. Twenty-six 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds and their primary caregivers were randomly assigned to an Illustrated or Non-Illustrated story-reading condition, and parents were instructed to "read or tell the story" as they normally would read with their child. Children recalled the story after a distracter and again after 1 week. Analyses of the story-reading interactions showed that the illustrations prompted more interactive story reading and more parent and child behaviors known to predict improved literacy outcomes. Furthermore, in the first memory interview, children in the Illustrated condition recalled more story events than those in the Non-Illustrated condition. Story reading measures predicted recall, but did not completely account for picture effects. These results suggest that illustrations enhance young preschoolers' story recall in an interactive story reading context, perhaps because the joint attention established in this context supports children's processing of the illustrations.

**Keywords: children's memory, parent-child story reading, illustrations, preschoolers, story recall**

## **INTRODUCTION**

A glance at the early childhood sections of any library or bookstore reveals that pictures books, or books in which pictures complement or dominate the text (Jalongo, 2004), are quite common in young children's literature. Why are illustrations so ubiquitous in story books for young children? It is widely believed that story illustrations help capture children's attention to stories and facilitate their understanding and retention of what is being read to them. This conclusion is bolstered by studies of preschool children's visual attention during storybook reading, which shows that they are overwhelmingly focused on the illustrations rather than the print (e.g., Evans and Saint-Aubin, 2005; Justice et al., 2008). Although pictures may capture children's attention, research from our laboratory and others suggests that they may not actually enhance very young children's comprehension and recall of the stories they accompany, at least in controlled story presentation contexts (e.g., Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). It remains to be seen, however, whether illustrations have different effects on children's processing of stories when they are read in a more naturalistic and interactive story-reading context. Therefore, we designed this experiment to examine the effects of story illustrations on parent-child story reading and preschool children's story recall. Because our work is grounded in the literature on memory and narrative development, we focused on children's abilities to recall the major events that took place in the story, rather than other dimensions such as vocabulary or a moral.

It is well-established that, among school-aged children and adults, memory for prose that is presented in written or auditory form is enhanced by illustrations (Levin and Lesgold, 1978; Brookshire et al., 2002; Carney and Levin, 2002). There are a number of explanations for this picture-enhancement effect. Exposure to information both verbally and pictorially may result in the construction of memory representations in both modalities that then provide redundant retrieval routes (Paivio, 1986, 1970). Pictures may also enhance attention and comprehension or organization of material, or provide cues about important information in the text to keep activated, all which may promote the formation of stronger, more elaborated and more organized memory traces (Gernsbacher, 1990; Levin and Mayer, 1993).

Although picture-facilitation effects are well-established in the literature on school-aged children and adults, the developmental literature suggests that story illustrations might not yield the same benefits for very young children as have been observed for older children (e.g., Guttman et al., 1977; Furnham et al., 2002; Pike et al., 2010). A few studies have documented pictureenhancement effects in preschoolers but only for very specific auditory information (e.g., the object of a sentence) that is also explicitly depicted in the pictures (Pressley et al., 1982; Digdon et al., 1985). This line of work has also shown that younger children require greater redundancy between the pictures and auditory information to show mnemonic benefits than do older children (Guttman et al., 1977; Furnham et al., 2002).

Research from our own laboratory on children's memories for more complex story narratives found that illustrations failed to enhance the memories of young preschoolers when they accompanied prerecorded stories (Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). In that study, children who were between 46 and 63 months of age were exposed to a story about a fictional animal character in one of four story-presentation formats: the verbal story narrative with illustrations, the narrative alone, the narrative with uninformative illustrations, or the illustrations alone. To ensure that the verbal presentation was identical across groups, the story narrative was pre-recorded and a tone cued children to turn the page. Although children in all verbal groups accurately recalled more story events than those in the picture-only group, for children younger than 4.5 years, there were no differences in recall performance between the three verbal groups. With increasing age, children exposed to the illustrated story narrative increasingly outperformed those in the other verbal groups, such that children older than 4.5 years did benefit from the informative illustrations. These benefits, moreover, were limited to information presented both in the text and the pictures. The overall pattern of results suggested that the illustrations did not simply improve motivation and attention to the listening task. Rather, the children must have attended to the content of the pictures because it determined whether they were effective in facilitating recall.

One explanation for the younger children's failure to benefit from story illustrations is that they may not understand the relevance of illustrations and therefore fail to encode the illustrations or use them as retrieval cues (e.g., Pressley and MacFadyen, 1983). Indeed, in the handful of studies that observed picture facilitation effects for preschoolers' recall of simple stimuli, the children were warned of the memory test and explicitly prompted to attend to the pictures (Pressley et al., 1982; Digdon et al., 1985). Another possibility is that very young children lack the processing capacity necessary to attend to and encode both the story and the pictures and to connect them in memory (Dempster, 1981; Cowan et al., 2002). Consistent with this argument, Mayer and Moreno (1998) showed that adults' ability to combine auditory and visual details in memory depends on the availability of working memory resources. Finally, the literature on symbolic development would suggest that young children struggle to maintain and connect the visual and verbal representations of the story in memory (e.g., Flavell et al., 1986; DeLoache, 2000).

In any case, it seems possible that illustrations could yield benefits in a story reading context in which an adult supports or "scaffolds" children's attention to and understanding of the illustrations. When a parent or other adult reads a story to a child, both the child and the reader may ask questions and make comments about the pictures and text. Research on adult-child story reading suggests that these types of story-reading behaviors enhance children's processing of stories. For example, adult references to print, both verbal and non-verbal, increase preschoolers' references to print (e.g., Justice et al., 2002, 2008). Moreover, parents' attempts to actively engage young children during story reading (Kang et al., 2009), and children's spontaneous utterances to parents (Kim et al., 2011), predict better child story retelling. These types of behaviors during parent-child story-reading also predict children's long-term literacy outcomes, including vocabulary and story comprehension skills (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1988; Haden et al., 1996; Reese and Cox, 1999; Hood et al., 2008). Although no studies have examined the specific role of illustrations in influencing parent-child story reading interactions, it seems quite possible that illustrations might elicit more discussion than narrative alone, which in turn might enhance children's comprehension and recall of the story. Thus, although illustrations alone might not enhance young children's memories for stories in a controlled story presentation context, illustrations could yield benefits in an interactive story-reading context.

Therefore, we designed this study to examine the specific role of illustrations in influencing parent-child storybook reading behavior and eliciting parent and the effects on 3.5 to 4.5-yearold children's story comprehension and recall. Children in this age range did not benefit from illustrations when they accompanied audio-recorded stories in Greenhoot and Semb (2008). In the current study we tested whether they would benefit when the same story narratives and pictures were used in an interactive story-reading context. We asked parents to read either an illustrated or non-illustrated story to their children, and later asked the children to retell the story to an experimenter. We analyzed the qualities of the story reading interactions in these two conditions and examined the relations to children's story recall. The specific aims were to (a) assess the influence of story illustrations on parent and child story-reading behavior, (b) examine the effects of illustrations on young preschoolers story recall in this interactive story-reading context, and (c) to determine how group and individual differences in parent-child story-reading behavior relate to preschoolers' recall of illustrated and non-illustrated stories.

## **METHODS**

#### **PARTICIPANTS**

The participants were 26 preschoolers (*M* = 48 months, range = 38–58 months) and their primary (or co-primary) caregivers from a small city in the Midwestern United States. Participants were volunteers who were recruited through ads distributed through local preschools, posted in the public library, and published in local newsletters aimed at families. Fifty-eight percent of the children were female. Almost all (92%) of the dyads were Caucasian, 4% were Hispanic and the remaining did not specify the parent or child's ethnicity. The mean level of education of the participants' parents was 16.8 years (range = 13–18 years) for mothers and 15.8 years (range = 7–18 years) for fathers, indicating that the children were generally from college-educated, middle-class families. Responses to a background questionnaire administered at the beginning of the study indicated that none of the child participants knew how to read at the time of the study. One parent-child dyad was unable to schedule the second session within a reasonable time frame, making the sample size for the 1-week recall analyses 25 rather than 26.

## **PROCEDURE**

The participants met individually with the experimenter for two sessions. To make participant recruitment easier, parents were given the choice of scheduling both sessions in a university laboratory space or in their homes; about half of the participants chose to meet in their homes (for both sessions) instead of the laboratory space, and this variable was relatively evenly distributed across story-reading conditions (39% in the Illustrated condition and 54% in the Non-Illustrated condition, *X*2 (1) = 0*.*62, *p* = 0*.*43). Dyads were randomly assigned to the Illustrated (I) or Non-Illustrated (NI) story-reading condition. The stories and the illustrations were the same as those used in two conditions of our previous study, and were experimentordesigned rather than commercially available books (Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). The Illustrated and Non-Illustrated book versions described the same 18 events involving a fictional animal character; in the Illustrated books, the gist of each event was depicted in two colorful illustrations. The main events of the story described actions of the fictional animal, as described below. Parents were encouraged to "read or tell the story" in the same manner in which they normally read stories to their child.

After the parent finished reading the story to his or her child, he or she completed a demographic questionnaire while the child completed a puzzle as a distracter task (approximately 5 min). This activity was followed by a Memory Interview in which the experimenter asked the child to recall the story. Approximately 1 week later (*M* = 7 days, range = 5–9 days) the same experimenter again met with the dyad and administered a second Memory Interview to elicit the children's delayed recall of the story. We videotaped the story-reading interactions and the memory interviews for later analysis. All procedures in this study were approved by the university Human Subjects Committee.

#### **MATERIALS**

#### *Stories*

As in the previous study, we used two different stories within each story presentation group to ensure that any effects were not specific to a particular set of stimuli. Within each story presentation group participants were randomly assigned to either the "Basil the Bobbin" story or the "Wilbur the Woozle" story, each of which were constructed for use in this (and other) research in our laboratory. Each story began with a brief description of the characteristics of a fictional type of animal (e.g., woozles have smooth skin, long snouts, fat bellies that they slide around on, and live in hollow logs) and then described a series of 18 events involving a specific animal character. An event was defined as a self-contained set of actions or occurrences that revolve around a central character, time, or place that have independent coherence (Linton, 1986); for these stories, each event was broadly defined by a place or time period in the story. Each event first described the setting for the event and initiating actions (e.g., Wilbur the Woozle sees a beautiful, shiny rock in a hole, but cannot get it out with his paw), and then described response actions and resolution of the event (e.g., Wilbur uses his long snout to push the rock out of the hole). The event narratives in the Bobbin story averaged 6.7 sentences, and 64.7 words, each, whereas those for the Woozle story averaged 6.6 sentences and 61.9 words.

In the Illustrated condition, there were two pictures per event, illustrating the gist of each event component (i.e., the setting/initiating actions and the resolution). For example, for the shiny rock event in the Woozle story, the first illustration depicted Wilbur looking at a shiny rock in a hole. The second illustration showed Wilbur with his snout extended to the hole to push it out.

#### *Memory Interview*

The Memory Interview consisted of a series of open-ended questions about the story at two levels of specificity. The interview began with a very general question (e.g., "What happened in that story about Wilbur the Woozles search for a new home?") to which children were encouraged to provide as much information as possible. This general probe was followed by more focused open-ended questions about each story event not already recalled by the child (e.g., "What happened when Wilbur saw the shiny rock?"). Children were prompted to elaborate on each event with, "Can you tell me more about that?" or "How did that happen?" All children were interviewed by the same experimenter for both sessions.

## **CODING**

#### *Story-reading interactions*

Drawing on previous research on parent-child story reading, we coded the videotaped story-reading interactions for a number of qualities, which are summarized in **Table 1**. First, we coded the frequency of several types of parent and child extra-textual comments and non-verbal behaviors during reading. All comments were divided into propositions (subject-verb constructions), with each unique or non-redundant proposition scored as a comment. We categorized these comments and behaviors according to their relation to the book content, including direct references to the book and/or the pictures or text in the book, references to the events described or depicted in the book, and elaborations on story content. We also coded for child inattentiveness by identifying the number of story events during which the child was inattentive to the story, and counted the number of parent attempts to redirect children's attention to the story reading task. We also scored the interactions on several global qualities. First, raters made a yes-no judgment about whether the story-reading activity was highly "interactive," defined as involving susbtantial verbal and/or non-verbal exchange between parent and child. They also made yes-no judgments about whether the parent was engaged in the story-reading task, and yes-no judgments about whether the child was largely distracted throughout the story-reading session. Finally, they rated parent emotional expressiveness on a 0–2 scale, with a 0 being no emotion expressed, a 1 being occasional or intermittent displays of emotion, and a 2 being consistent expression of emotion. All coding was completed by two raters. Interrater reliability, calculated on approximately 20% of the videotaped interactions, was high, with the raters agreeing on 93% of the scores they assigned. In addition to the interaction coding, the raters measured the length of time parents and children took to read each book.

#### *Story recall coding*

Children's recall performance was evaluated for accuracy and completeness by comparing their reports in the memory interviews to the actual text of the stories. Each story event that the child reported was assigned one of four codes: Accurate Complete, Elaboration, Partial Recall, or Distortion. If the child

#### **Table 1 | Story-reading interaction codes.**

recalled the gist of what was stated in the text about an event, the response was coded as Accurate Recall (e.g., "Wilbur got the rock out of the hole with his snout."). Accurate Recall also included embellishments on the text that were generally consistent with the text (e.g., "Wilbur dug and dug with his snout until he finally knocked the rock out of the hole."). If a child only recalled part of an event (i.e., if the child did not report the event resolution) but was otherwise accurate, the event was assigned a Partial Recall code (e.g., "Wilbur could not get the rock out with his foot."). A Total Recall score was calculated as the sum of Accurate Recall and Partial Recall. A Distortion was coded when a child distorted a story event in recall (e.g., "Wilbur ate the rock."), whereas an Intrusion was coded when a child reported an event that was not described in the text at all (e.g., "Wilbur rode a bicycle."). Two research assistants each scored the interview transcripts, overlapping on approximately 20% of the sample for reliability purposes. Interrater reliability for the memory codes was quite good, as indicated by percent agreement of 94%.

For each child at each interview, we calculated a Total Recall score as the proportion of story events receiving an Accurate Complete, Elaboration, or Partial Recall code. We also calculated a more conservative recall score of Accurate Complete Recall, consisting of the proportion Accurate Complete and Elaboration codes. Finally, we calculated Recall Error scores as the proportion of story events for which children received Distortion or Intrusion scores.

## **RESULTS**

We designed the analyses to address each of the three major aims of the study. First, we examined group differences in parent and child story-reading codes, to determine whether the illustrations affected the quality of parent-child storybook reading. Next, we tested the effects of the illustrations on children's story recall. Third, we explored how individual differences in parent-child story reading interactions related to children's story recall in the two presentation conditions.

#### **PARENT-CHILD STORY-READING BEHAVIOR**

Preliminary analyses indicated that parent comments, summed across the individual story reading codes, were quite frequent (*M* = 22*.*5) and more than twice as common as comments from the child (*M* = 10*.*8). Individual parent story-reading codes were interrelated; parent book-related comments were positively associated with parent event-related comments and parent redirections (*r*s ≥ 0.48, *p*s ≥ 0.01), and parent elaborations were correlated with parent event-related comments and parent emotion expressiveness (*r*s ≥ 0.65, *p*s ≤ 0.0003). Child story reading codes were also interrelated, with child event-related comments positively associated with book-related comments and elaborations (*r*s ≥ 0.61, *p*s ≤ 0.0009). Finally, parent and child measures also correlated with each other, with particularly strong associations between parent and child codes for the same types of comments (*r*s ≥ 0.57, *p*s ≤ 0.002).

There were several indications that the illustrations affected parent-child story-reading interactions. As shown in **Table 2**, both parents and children made more direct references to the book and more comments about the text in the Illustrated than Non-Illustrated condition. In contrast, illustrations did not produce significant differences in the frequency with which parents or children made comments about the story events or elaborated on story content. Furthermore, although parents tended to do more redirecting and children were inattentive more frequently in the Non-Illustrated condition, these differences did not reach significance. Interestingly, parent emotion expressiveness scores were higher in the Non-Illustrated condition than the Illustrated condition.

**Figure 1** summarizes the global story reading interaction scores for the two conditions. Almost two-thirds of reading sessions in the Illustrated condition were coded as Interactive story-reading, compared to 31% in the Non-Illustrated condition, although the difference did not reach significance, *X*2 (1) = 2*.*48, *p* = 0*.*12. Although parent engagement was unaffected by Illustration condition, children in the Non-Illustrated condition were significantly more likely to be distracted from story reading

**Table 2 | Mean scores (and standard deviations) of parent and child story-reading codes, by condition.**

than those in the Illustrated condition, *X*2 (1) = 4*.*89, *p* = 0*.*027. Indeed, of the 7 children rated as highly distracted, 6 were in the Non-Illustrated condition. Further, 4 of these children (all Non-Illustrated) had parents who made many attempts at redirection or engagement (i.e., between 19 and 60 parent comments and gestures across the story reading session).

There was no significant difference between conditions in the length of the reading sessions, *t*(24) = 0*.*58, *p* = 0*.*57. Book reading took an average of 9 min 18 s in the Illustrated condition, and 9 min 48 s in the Non-Illustrated condition.

#### **ILLUSTRATIONS AND CHILDREN'S STORY RECALL**

**Figure 2** shows the Total Recall, Accurate Complete, and Recall Error scores for the immediate interview, as a function of story presentation condition. **Figure 3** shows a parallel set of scores for the 1-week interview. Even according to the more liberal scoring scheme used for calculating Total Recall, the children remembered less than half of the events depicted in the story at both interviews. Furthermore, a little over one fourth of the story events were recalled incorrectly at both interviews. Thus, this recall task seemed to be a challenging one for the participants.

Importantly, however, children's story recall was notably better in the Illustrated condition than the Non-Illustrated condition. Specifically, children in the Illustrated condition had higher Total Recall scores than those in the Non-Illustrated condition at the immediate interview, *t*(24) = 2*.*14, *p* = 0*.*043. Although Accurate Complete Recall was also higher in the Illustrated condition at the first interview (38% vs. 26%), this difference did not reach significance, *t*(24) = 1*.*52, *p* = 0*.*14. The advantage in Total Recall for the Illustrated condition over the Non-Illustrated condition was somewhat maintained at Time 2 (44% vs. 41%), but the difference was no longer statistically significant. Recall Error scores did not differ between story presentation groups at either interview. Thus, in contrast to our previous findings with prerecorded stories in the same age group, illustrations in parent-presented stories

**FIGURE 2 | Recall performance at the immediate interview, by story-reading condition.**

increased children's abilities to remember the story narrative, particularly in the short term.

#### **INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN PARENT-CHILD STORY READING AND CHILDREN'S STORY RECALL**

The goal of these anlayses was to examine how the qualities of parent-child story reading predicted children's abilities to retell the story later. We were also interested in whether the qualities of parent-child story reading could explain the modest improvements in recall performance produced by the story illustrations.

#### *Identifying covariates*

First, to identify possible covariates to be included in our individual difference analyses, we used pearson correlations, *t*-tests and chi-square analyses to test whether the variables of interest (story reading measures and story recall measures) were associated with variables such as the children's age (in months), gender, and reading experience, mother's years of education, material set, and experiment location (lab vs. home). None of the story reading measures were associated with any of these variables. Children's story recall was related to their age and the location of their experimental sessions. Specifically, older children had higher Accurate Complete Recall and Total Recall scores at both interviews (*r*s ≥ 0.42, *p*s ≤ 0.031), and lower Recall Error scores at both interviews (*r*s ≤ −0*.*38, *p*s ≤ 0.06), although the association with 1-week Recall Errors was only marginally significant. Children who participated in a lab setting had superior story recall to those who participated in their homes, *t*s *>* 2.79, *p*s *<* 0.01. For instance, Total Recall scores at the immediate interview averaged 0.52 in the lab condition and 0.30 in the home condition. Story recall was unrelated to child gender, material set, or mothers' education. Therefore, we controlled for both session location (lab = 1; home = 0) and child age (in months) in these analyses.

#### *Predictive models*

We tested the relations between story-reading qualities and story recall in a series of general linear models (GLMs) predicting each of the recall measures (Total Recall, Accurate Complete Recall, and Recall Errors) at the immediate and 1-week interview. This approach enabled us to control for age and location and to test each parent story reading code along with the corresponding child code(s). We ran the GLMs separately for memory measures at the two different time points because a traditional repeated measures approach would have resulted in casewise deletion of data from the child who did not participate in the second memory interview.

To test whether the story-reading qualities explained group differences in recall, we first ran a set of models containing only location, age, and group (Model 1). By comparing the parameter estimates for group in this simple model to those in models containing story-reading variables, we could assess the degree to which the story-reading qualities accounted for group recall differences. The small sample size limited the number of predictors we could include in any one model, therefore we tested several sets of models, each with a different category of story reading codes as additional predictors (see **Table 3**). The second set of models (Model 2) tested the predictive value of parent and child event-related comments, over and above group, age, and location. Likewise, the set of models labeled Model 3 tested the predictive values of child inattention and parent redirection when group, age and location were in the model. Finally, model 4 tested the predictive value of the global story reading qualities (i.e., parent emotion expressiveness, parent engagement, child distraction, and interactive story reading). The models with the categories of book-related comments and elaborations as predictors revealed no links between these variables and story recall, therefore we do not present them here.

**Table 3** displays the parameter estimates (and standard errors) generated by the GLMs. In Model 1, participation in the lab setting and child age were all positively related to measures of children's recall performance. Furthermore, being in the Illustrated group was related to better Total Recall at the first interview, although this effect was only marginally significant. But the results from Models 2 through 4 provide some evidence that extra-textual comments and behaviors during story reading contribute to children's story recall, over and above the effects of the Model 1 variables. The GLMs testing parent and child event related comments showed that parent comments (Model 2) were

**Table 3 | Parameter estimates (and standard errors) generated by GLMs predicting recall performance from child age, experiment location, group, and parent-child story reading codes.**

*\*\*\*p < 0.001; \*\*p < 0.01; \*p < 0.05; ap < 0.07; bp < 0.10.*

related to both Total Recall and Accurate Complete Recall at the immediate interview. The more parents discussed the events in the book with their children, the better children remembered the story events after a short distracter. Importantly, however, parent event-related comments do not appear to explain the advantage in Total Recall of the Illustrated group, as the parameter estimate for group was not reduced by the inclusion of event-related comments in Model 2.

The models including child inattention and parent redirects (Model 3) revealed that child inattention predicted more Recall Errors at the first interview. Therefore, the more story events for which children were not attentive, the more errors they made in retelling the story. Finally, the models that included the global qualities (Model 4) showed that higher parent expressiveness predicted fewer recall errors at the immediate interview and recall of more story events at the delayed interview. Additionally, children who were completely disengaged during story reading had lower levels of Total Recall and Accurate Complete Recall at the immediate interview. Interestingly, in this last set of models the parameter estimate for group was somewhat reduced, suggesting that increased rates of child disengagement in the Non-Illustrated condition could be at least partially responsible for the recall advantage seen in the Illustrated condition.

## **DISCUSSION**

Illustrations are commonplace in storybooks for young children, yet the scant research on their influence on children's story retelling has suggested that young preschool children actually learn very little from story illustrations when they are presented in a non-interactive story-reading context (e.g., Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). The results of this investigation suggest that illustrations do enhance young preschoolers' story recall when they are presented in an interactive story reading context. Thus, young preschoolers may be unable to glean both visual and auditory information from a story and/or integrate the information in a context that requires them to do this alone, but our current findings are consistent with the view that parents help support or "scaffold" such processes in an interactive story reading context. Parents may use the pictures to keep children engaged in the reading activity, help children see the relevance of the illustrations for comprehending the story, and/or facilitate children's ability to attend to the pictures and verbal information and integrate them in memory. These findings fit well with sociocultural models of development, which highlight the role of adult-child interaction in guiding and supporting children's participation in activities and socializing their skill development (Vygotsky, 1978; Rogoff, 1990; Nelson and Fivush, 2004). It should be noted, however that the parent-supported enhancements observed in this study were not especially robust or long-lasting; pictures facilitated children's immediate recall of the stories but significant benefits were not maintained after a 1-week delay.

Our analyses of the story reading interactions reveals some of the things parents might do to support children's processing of the illustrations. These analyses showed that the presence of illustrations influenced both parent and child behaviors during story reading. Both parents and children made more references to the book in the Illustrated condition, and this increase in book references was not limited to the illustrations themselves. Parents and children also made more references to the text when pictures were present than when they were not. Nonetheless, the predictive models showed that these references to the book were not directly related to children's recall of the story events.

The global measures of story reading quality also indicated that the illustrations prompted a more interactive and engaged style of story reading. Children in the Illustrated condition were less likely to be rated as distracted than those in the Non-Illustrated condition. Indeed, of the 7 children who were rated as distracted, 6 were in the Non-Illustrated condition and 4, all of whom were in the Non-Illustrated condition, had parents who had made numerous engagement attempts. Thus, these parent efforts at engagement may have failed without the support of pictures. The predictive models showed that children who more frequently displayed inattentiveness, and those who were judged to be completely distracted during the story presentation, had poorer recall performance at the immediate interview. Moreover, the predictive value of group was somewhat reduced when these attention variables were included in the models. These patterns suggest that the parents may have used the illustrations to hold children's attention to the story reading activity, leading to improved recall of the story events, at least in the short-term.

Interestingly, parent emotional expressiveness was actually higher in the Non-Illustrated condition than the Illustrated condition, suggesting that parents may have tried to compensate for the absence of illustrations by increasing their emotional expressiveness as they read. Perhaps they were using this elevated emotional expressiveness to keep children engaged with the story reading activity. Thus, our small sample of well-educated mothers appears to be quite sensitive to the story reading context. The fact that parent emotion expressiveness also was related to fewer recall errors at both interviews and higher overall recall at the 1 week interview recall suggests that compensation attempts for the absence of pictures could have reduced the robustness of the differences between the Illustrated and Non-Illustrated conditions. Of course, within-person comparisons of maternal story reading with illustrated and non-illustrated stories would provide a more definitive evaluation of this claim. It also remains to be seen whether this pattern would generalize to a more diverse sample, as pre-emergent reading behaviors have been shown to vary according to socioeconomic status (Bus et al., 1995). It would also be important to explore whether these illustration effects on parent expressiveness would generalize to different types of stories (e.g., stories that are either more or less interesting than those used here).

References to the events described in the story were the one category of story-reading measures that did not differ across the Illustrated and Non-Illustrated groups. However, consistent with the literature on parent-child story-reading interactions (e.g., Kang et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2011), individual differences in this dimension of story reading interactions were linked to differences in children's recall at the initial interview. In particular, children whose mothers offered more comments and questions about the events described in the stories, such as inferences or predictions about what will happen, learned more from the stories than other children. Therefore, although this feature of the interactions did not seem to account for the illustration effects, it seemed to support children's recall of the events in the story regardless of the presentation format.

Overall, the pattern of results in this study suggests that the illustrations prompted more interactive story reading and more behaviors known to predict improved literacy outcomes for children (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1988; Haden et al., 1996; Reese and Cox, 1999; Hood et al., 2008). Furthermore, the illustrations did produce recall enhancements and parent and child story-reading behaviors predicted children's story recall. Nonetheless, our story reading measures only partially accounted for the effects of the illustrations on children's story recall. This pattern suggests that our story reading measures simply may not have captured the actual mediating variables. For instance, it seems likely that it is simply the joint attention established between parent and child in this context supports children's processing of the illustrations. It is also quite possible that the dimensions of story-reading that we measured support dimensions of children's processing and recall of the stories that we did not capture in this study.

The current study was limited to mother-child story storybook reading, and there is some evidence that parent-child book-reading may differ for mothers and fathers (Anderson et al., 2004). For instance, Anderson et al. (2004) found that fathers asked for more clarification and made more confirmations when reading informational books to their 4 year-olds than mothers. Although previous research has not found differences in how fathers and mothers read narrative stories to children, future research should explore whether the effects of illustrations observed in mothers in this study extend to fathers' reading styles.

Another future consideration in understanding illustration effects on book reading with young children is the genre of book, as some work has documented differences in book reading interactions depending on genre of book (Mason et al., 1989; Price et al., 2009). Price et al. (2009) found substantial differences in parents' book reading, for storybooks verses informational, nonfiction books. For instance, parents spent more time reading and commenting on the informational books than the storybooks. Moreover, parents provided more feedback to the child, commented more about the character/animal, and made more elaborations and inferences during the informational book reading. Interestingly, the storybooks in their study averaged eight more illustrations than the informational books. Similar interactional patterns have been observed with teacher book sharing (Mason et al., 1989). Parents' and teachers' heightened commenting and elaborating on informational books could potentially provide even greater scaffolding for illustration processing, leading to heightened picture facilitation effects.

These findings have a number of implications for understanding the optimal ways of presenting stories to young children, and address issues that are particularly important in an age of increasing reliance on non-human sources of information for children. First, this study highlights the fact that a story presentation context that allows for social exchange may be critical for helping children to process and retain narratives or other material from storybooks. Second, for young preschoolers in the prereading phase, story illustrations help to elicit the sorts of story-reading interactions that are known to enhance children's story processing and relate to positive literacy outcomes. One necessary extension of this line of work is to examine how digital technology affects shared book reading. Some work suggests that children adopt a more participatory role when read an e-book by a researcher than a traditional storybook (Moody et al., 2010). Yet other work suggests that touch sensitive e-readers may negatively impact parent-child shared book reading interactions and children's comprehension (Parish-Morris et al., 2013). With the proliferation of e-readers for people of all ages, it is time to find out whether such media can provide as supportive an environment for adult-child story-sharing interactions as a traditional illustrated storybook.

#### **REFERENCES**

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). *Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes.* Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Whitehurst, G. J., Falco, F. L., Lonigan, C., Fischel, J. E., DeBaryshe, B. D., Valdez-Menchaca, M. C., et al. (1988). Accelerating language development through picture book reading. *Dev. Psychol.* 24, 552–558. doi: 10.1037/0012-16<IP_ADDRESS>2

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 26 November 2013; accepted: 24 June 2014; published online: 22 July 2014.*

*Citation: Greenhoot AF, Beyer AM and Curtis J (2014) More than pretty pictures? How illustrations affect parent-child story reading and children's story recall. Front. Psychol. 5:738. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00738*

*This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Greenhoot, Beyer and Curtis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

## Storybooks aren't just for fun: narrative and non-narrative picture books foster equal amounts of generic language during mother-toddler book sharing

## *Angela Nyhout\* and Daniela K. O'Neill\**

*Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada*

#### *Edited by:*

*Carmel Houston-Price, University of Reading, UK*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Jeff Loucks, University of Regina, Canada Susan Annetta Graham, University of Calgary, Canada*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Angela Nyhout and Daniela K. O'Neill, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Parents and children encounter a variety of animals and objects in the early picture books they share, but little is known about how the context in which these entities are presented influences talk about them. The present study investigated how the presence or absence of a visual narrative context influences mothers' tendency to refer to animals as individual characters or as members of a kind when sharing picture books with their toddlers (mean age 21.3 months). Mother-child dyads shared both a narrative and a non-narrative book, each featuring six animals and matched in terms of length and quantity of text. Mothers made more specific (individual-referring) statements about animals in the narrative books, whereas they provided more labels for animals in the non-narrative books. But, of most interest, the frequency and proportion of mothers' use of generic (kind-referring) utterances did not differ across the two different types of books. Further coding of the content of the utterances revealed that mothers provided more story-specific descriptions of states and actions of the animals when sharing narrative books and more physical descriptions of animals when sharing non-narrative books. However, the two books did not differ in terms of their elicitation of natural facts about the animals. Overall, although the two types of books encouraged different types of talk from mothers, they stimulated generic language and talk about natural facts to an equal degree. Implications for learning from picture storybooks and book genre selection in classrooms and home reading are discussed.

**Keywords: generic language, parent-child interactions, book sharing, narrative books, informational books, book genre, contextual influences**

#### **INTRODUCTION**

Individuals possess knowledge about events, objects, and living things that they have not observed first hand. Historical events, entities too distant, and those too minute, are beyond what the average human can observe. Yet, most of us possess at least some basic information about the ice age, the planet Jupiter, and atoms. Given that most individuals will never have the opportunity to participate in an archeological dig or peer through an electron microscope, we must learn about such entities indirectly. Two important sources of this information for children, relevant to the present article, are the testimony of other individuals (Harris and Koenig, 2006) and picture books (DeTemple and Snow, 2003).

As children encounter objects (e.g., a bicycle) and animals (e.g., an elephant) in picture books and other settings, they may take them to be individuals (e.g., Jamie's bicycle; Babar) or members of a category (e.g., bicycles; elephants) (Hall et al., 2001). When referring to entities in the world, certain linguistic markers can distinguish whether one is communicating about the entity as an individual or as a member of a category. Information that is conveyed using specific language tends to refer to individuals (e.g., "Shadow has a soft coat"), whereas information that is conveyed using generic language pertains to categories (e.g., "Dogs have four legs"). Information that is delivered using generic language is readily incorporated into children's knowledge-bases (Prasada, 2000; Cimpian and Markman, 2008). This can lead to robust learning of facts about the world (e.g., elephants are very social animals) that is resistant to counter-examples (e.g., Rowan the elephant isn't sociable). Thus, whether children consider an entity as an individual or as a member of a category can influence whether they incorporate the information they encounter into their knowledge-base. As such, it is of interest to investigate the factors that influence whether talk about entities is primarily individual-referring vs. category-referring.

#### **CONTEXTUAL INFLUENCES ON GENERIC LANGUAGE USE**

In a study by Gelman et al. (2005), parent-child conversations included more generic utterances when dyads interacted with pictures of objects than when they interacted with the objects themselves. Gelman and colleagues suggested this was because pictures are more representational of categories, whereas objects are more likely to be perceived as individuals in their own right. Comparing parent-toddler conversations across picture book sharing and toy play, Gelman and Tardif (1998) similarly found that generic utterances were more common during picture book sharing than during toy play, comprising 4.7% of utterances during book sharing. Thus, it is clear that contextual factors influence the use of generic, category-referring language during interactions between parents and their preschoolers or toddlers. In subsequent studies, Gelman et al. (2013) found that adults and 5- and 6-year-olds used more generics when they were in a pedagogical context or role than when they were in a "peer-to-peer" situation. These findings provide support for Csibra and Gergely's (2009) theory of natural pedagogy, which posits that pedagogical contexts encourage the communication of generic information.

Given that picture book sharing seems to be a particularly fruitful setting for talk about categories, it is of interest whether the format in which animals are presented in books can influence the use of language referring to individuals and categories. Recently, in a first study to investigate this, Gelman et al. (2013) analyzed 75 informational and narrative picture books designed for 4- to 9-year-olds and found that informational books contained significantly more generic noun phrases than narrative books. Both types of books, however, contained significantly more specific noun phrases than they did generics.

Together, these studies established that context does indeed influence the extent to which entities are considered as individuals or as members of a category, as reflected by the relative frequency of generic language use. Moreover, two of these studies (Gelman and Tardif, 1998; Gelman et al., 2005) demonstrated that generic language is present in mothers' talk with their toddlers (25 to 38-month-olds and 19- to 23-month-olds, respectively), the population relevant to the present study (18- to 25-month-olds).

Given the young age of the children in the present study, another important consideration is the extent to which children of this age are sensitive to cues in language that distinguish generic and specific referents. Gelman and Raman (2003) found that 2 year-olds were sensitive to relevant morphosyntactic cues, such as the presence or absence of the definite article, *the* (e.g., "Do the birds fly?" vs. "Do birds fly?"). Graham et al. (2011) found that 30-month-olds, but not 24-month-olds were able to distinguish between generic and non-generic utterances to make inferences about novel kinds. However, because this task required the extra step of inductive inference, the findings do not necessarily indicate a lack of comprehension amongst the younger age group. Although there is currently no evidence that children are able to distinguish between such syntactic cues before the age of two, the presence of such syntactic distinctions in the input from adults certainly precedes their understanding.

#### **THE EFFECT OF BOOK GENRE**

As mentioned above, picture book sharing appears to stimulate generic language use more than other types of parent-child interactions that have been studied. How parents' generic language use may vary as a function of book genre has not, to our knowledge, been a subject of previous investigation. In particular, because the educational value of storybooks has been called into question (e.g., Torr and Clugston, 1999; Bosman, 2010), it is of interest to investigate the extent to which different types of books for young children encourage parents to express generic knowledge and facts.

Recent media reports suggest that picture storybook sales have declined as parents seek books that they believe are more educational (e.g., Bosman, 2010), such as early readers and informational books. Non-narrative books (e.g., books focusing on building vocabulary) for children frequently make claims about the types of skills and knowledge they can provide, whereas storybooks tend to provide only short synopses. Whether the nature of the communicative interaction that arises is indeed more 'educational' when sharing non-narrative books, compared to narrative books, is relatively unstudied (Nyhout and O'Neill, 2013). Because of documented cross-contextual differences in parents' talk, it is of interest to investigate how the genre of book parents share with their children may affect their use of more "educational" or "pedagogical" talk. Although pedagogical contexts certainly encourage many types of language, our focus in the present study was specifically on two types of language as indices of *pedagogical language*: (1) generic language and (2) natural facts.

Most investigations of the influence of book genre have compared parents' abstract comments and questions during narrative and informational (i.e., non-fiction) book sharing interactions between parents and *preschoolers*. Generally, these studies have found that mothers' talk is more abstract during informational book sharing than during narrative book sharing (Torr and Clugston, 1999; DeTemple, 2001; Anderson et al., 2004; Price et al., 2009).

In contrast to findings with preschoolers, we found that mothers' talk with *toddlers* was more complex during narrative book sharing than during non-narrative book sharing (Nyhout and O'Neill, 2013). This different pattern of results was likely due to differences in the age of the children and the fact that we employed greater experimental control over the books being compared. Previous studies comparing narrative and informational books used books that differed on a number of dimensions such as subject, number of pages, and quantity of text (Torr and Clugston, 1999; DeTemple, 2001; Anderson et al., 2004).

In addition to this sizable body of work investigating differences in parents' talk across book genres, in one study (Ganea et al., 2011) it was also noted that children were able to generalize a principle (camouflage) learned from a picture book to real world problems. They were able to do this regardless of whether the information was presented in a factual or intentional (i.e., narrative) framework, although the specific focus of the study was not on book genre.

#### **RATIONALE FOR THE PRESENT STUDY**

In the present study, we analyzed the interactions from Nyhout and O'Neill (2013), but in this case were interested in whether the context in which an animal was presented in a picture book influenced the extent to which mothers referred to the animal as an individual or as a member of a kind. We were specifically interested in whether the *presence or absence of narrative context* influenced mothers' tendency to refer to the characters as individuals or as members of a kind.

Suppose that a book features 6 animals. One prediction might be that presenting the 6 animals in the framework of a narrative will lead parents and children to consider the animals as *individuals* (e.g., The Bear). Indeed, it is often the intention of tellers of narratives to introduce the audience to individuals; the presence of characters is at the core of what it is to be a narrative (Bruner, 1986). In contrast, if the 6 animals are presented in a contextless (i.e., non-narrative) manner typical of didactic books, parents and children may be more likely to think about and discuss *categories or kinds* of animals (e.g., bears). Indeed, introducing the audience to categories of animals or objects is often the goal of creators of non-narrative books (Martin, 1985). In support of these views, the content analysis of the texts of children's narrative and informational picture books by Gelman et al. (2013), discussed above, did find that the texts in informational books contained significantly more generic noun phrases than the texts of narrative books.

But in book sharing interactions between parents and children, parents' talk may be differentially influenced by book genre. This may especially be the case in parent-toddler interactions, given that books with little to no text may be shared, and parents are freer to talk about the content as they wish, as found in Nyhout and O'Neill (2013). Thus, with respect to the use of generic or non-generic language, it is not necessarily the case that differences found to exist within the *texts* of different genres of books will pertain in the same manner to parents' *talk* when sharing these different genres of books with their child. Indeed, in a broader context, the syntactic constructions presented in picture books texts for 2-year-olds have been found to significantly differ from those occurring in parents' talk with children aged 21–32 months (Cameron-Faulkner and Noble, 2013). It is an open question whether findings on genre differences in book texts extend to parents' talk, especially when sharing books with very young children, who are the focus of interest in our present study.

Thus, to explore the influence of book genre on talk about individuals and kinds, we compared mothers' talk with their toddlers while they shared two picture books, each about 6 animals: a short narrative and a non-narrative book. In the narrative books, the animals were introduced one-by-one within the context of a story with background scenes and with no text except for the label of each animal when first introduced. In the non-narrative books, the animals were introduced one-by-one alone on a blank page with a single label (see Methods). Thus, the key manipulation was the presence or absence of a narrative context.

We were interested in both the *framing* and the *content* of mothers' utterances. In coding the framing, we looked at whether mother's statements were presented with a *generic* (e.g., "*Lions* say "roar"") or *specific* subject (e.g., "*He* says "roar""), or as a label (e.g., "That's a lion"), based on the coding scheme developed by Gelman et al. (2005). In coding the content, we looked at whether mothers' utterances comprised a *physical description* of an animal in the book (e.g., "He has black and white fur"); a *story-specific* description of an animal's state or action (e.g., "The bear is sleepy"), or a *natural fact*, which included a description of an unobservable behavior or property of an animal in the book (e.g., "He (badger) uses his sharp claws and goes dig, dig, dig"). Note that these two levels of coding (framing and content) can offer unique information, especially when the content concerns physical descriptions or natural facts. For example, a *natural fact* could be presented by a mother using generic (e.g., "Armadillos can curl up in balls") or specific syntax (e.g., "He can curl up in a ball").

It seems reasonable to expect that mothers will employ more specific utterances during narrative book sharing; that is, as the animals engage in actions unique to the story, it is likely mothers will describe these actions (e.g., "The elephant is escaping from the cage!"). However, the differences across narrative and nonnarrative genres in generic language use are harder to predict, if differences are present at all. On the one hand, one may predict that the non-narrative books will elicit more generic language from mothers, because the animals in the non-narrative books may be seen as more representational of categories than when they are presented in the framework of a narrative. Note that this prediction would be in line with the predictions and findings of Gelman et al. (Gelman and Tardif, 1998; Gelman et al., 2005). On the other hand, one may predict that the narrative books will elicit more generic language from mothers, because the context provided by the narrative books may trigger generic knowledge about the animals. For example, reading the popular children's book *Stellaluna* may remind parents of facts about bats' diet, habitat, and behaviors in ways that a picture of a bat may not. Thus, we did not have firm predictions about how narrative context would influence mothers' use of generic language, though we expected more specific language during narrative book sharing.

## **METHODS**

#### **PARTICIPANTS**

Twenty-five mother-toddler dyads participated in the study (12 girls, mean child age = 21.3 months, range = 18.9 to 25.4 months). Two additional dyads participated but were dropped because they failed to complete one of the books (*n* = 1) and because the child was distracted for most of the book sharing interaction (*n* = 1). Participants were recruited from a university laboratory database of local families and through advertisements in the community. Fifteen mothers (63%) had completed an undergraduate degree or higher, eight had completed a technical college diploma (33%), and two had completed a high school diploma (8%). Mothers ranged in age from 25 to 39 (mean = 32.6 years). Dyads were screened for prior exposure to the two books used in the study at the time of recruitment.

#### **MATERIALS AND DESIGN**

The books for the study were created by adapting two commercially-available children's picture books, *Good Night, Gorilla* (Rathmann, 1994) and *Don't Wake Up the Bear!* (Murray, 2003). In *Good Night, Gorilla*, a zoo keeper makes his rounds to ensure all the animals are locked away for the night. Unbeknownst to the zoo keeper, a gorilla has stolen his keys and sneaks behind him as he walks through the zoo and unlocks the other animals' cages. In turn, an elephant, a lion, a giraffe, a hyena, and an armadillo all escape. The animals then follow the zoo keeper back to his house. In *Don't Wake Up the Bear!*, we are introduced to a bear sleeping in his cave in a snowy forest. Five other woodland animals, who are out in the cold, are trying to find a warm place to sleep. One-by-one, a hare, a badger, a fox, a squirrel, and a mouse come by until they are all cuddled up together in the bear's cave. Both original stories continue, but we ended the adapted versions at the points described to allow for consistent length across book versions (described below). Both books contained six animals in total and began with a single animal that was joined by a new animal on each page, until all six were together.

From each original book, we created one narrative and one non-narrative version for our study, which were matched for length in terms of both number of pages and amount of text, and the target content of interest (i.e., the six animals). *Good Night, Gorilla* and *Don't Wake Up the Bear!* were renamed *Animals at the Zoo* and *Animals in the Woods*, respectively. The narrative versions of each book included the same original illustrations, but the text on each page was removed and replaced with a single label per page identifying the focal animal. For the non-narrative versions of each book, we cropped the focal animal from each page in the original and placed it in the center of a blank page with the same single label. Thus, the two versions of each book included the same text (the label for each animal) and the same focal animal. Critically, the illustration of the animal was the same across both genres. The manipulation of interest was therefore the presence or absence of an illustrated narrative context. For both the narrative and non-narrative versions of each book, the final page presented all animals together with no text. The narrative versions included the original illustrations, whereas the non-narrative versions included discrete illustrations of each animal that were arranged in a line across the page. Readers interested in seeing the two versions of the books may contact the authors for a copy.

Our design was within-subjects, and dyads shared either the narrative version of *Animals at the Zoo* and the non-narrative version of *Animals in the Woods*, or the narrative version of *Animals in the Woods* and the non-narrative version of *Animals at the Zoo*. The order of presentation was fully counterbalanced.

#### **PROCEDURE**

Dyads were presented with the first book and were asked to share the book as they would at home. The second book was placed in a box, outside the child's view, and mothers were asked to retrieve it after finishing the first book. They were asked to share each book only once, from front to back. Dyads sat with the child on the mother's lap, in separate chairs beside each other, or on the floor together. The interactions were video recorded.

#### **TRANSCRIPT CODING**

The interactions were transcribed using the Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcriptions (CHAT) transcription system (MacWhinney and Snow, 1990; MacWhinney, 2000). Because each dyad shared two books (one narrative and one nonnarrative), there were two transcripts per dyad.

To begin with, all utterances in the transcripts that referred to one of the six animals in each book (i.e., that had an animal as their subject, except in the case of labeling) were selected as utterances to be coded. Utterances that referred to aspects of the background scene (e.g., "Look at that moon") and events in the child's life (e.g., "Remember when we saw a lion at the zoo?") were not included in the coding.

#### *Utterance framing: generic subject, specific subject, or labels*

The utterance framing coding scheme was adapted from Gelman et al. (2005), who coded for generic phrases, individuating phrases, and ostensive labeling phrases. Under the Gelman et al. (2005) coding scheme, generic phrases included those with bare plurals (e.g., elephants), indefinite singulars (e.g., an elephant), and definite singulars (e.g., the elephant) as their subject. Specific (individuating) phrases included those with proper names (e.g., Babar), singular pronouns (e.g., he/she), and count nouns (e.g., some elephants) as their subject. Given that the picture books used in this study only included labels for the animals and not proper names (e.g., Babar), parents' commonly referred to specific animals using definite singulars (e.g., The elephant is sleeping.). Thus, such definite singular constructions were coded as specific in all cases. Labeling phrases were those that served to place an individual in a category (e.g., "that's a lion") and did not contain any additional descriptive information (e.g., "that's a funny-looking hyena").

#### *Utterance content: physical descriptions, natural facts, and story-specific utterances*

In an initial look at our transcripts, we noticed that mothers would often make kind-relevant statements using a specific subject (e.g., a singular pronoun: "he says roar"). Thus, all the generic and specific subject utterances identified were further coded with respect to *utterance content*. In particular, each utterance's content was coded as either physical description, story-specific, or natural fact. **Table 1** provides more detailed descriptions and examples of the coding of utterance content. Via this coding, we sought to determine whether the two picture book genres differed in the extent to which they stimulated talk about the animals that provided unobservable natural facts vs. information about observable characteristics (physical descriptions) and depicted states and events (story-specific). Our primary interest was in natural facts, because it is this type of information that is often expected to be conveyed using generic language.

Two coders, one blind to the purpose of the study, coded the utterances that referred to animals, as described above, in all 50 transcripts. Coding agreement was excellent for both utterance framing (κ = 0*.*90) and content (κ = 0*.*96).

## **RESULTS**

Overall, as reported in Nyhout and O'Neill (2013), mothers produced an average of 50.40 (*SD* = 30*.*36) utterances during narrative book sharing and 35.56 (*SD* = 14*.*58) utterances during non-narrative book sharing, *t*(24) = 2*.*90 *p* = 0*.*008. Note that the greater quantity of talk during narrative book sharing can mostly be attributed to the presence of the background scene, which was present in the narrative versions, but not the nonnarrative versions of each book. Mothers had the opportunity to discuss aspects of the background scene during narrative book sharing (e.g., a snowy tree, the animals' cages). Because mothers talked significantly more during narrative book sharing, Nyhout and O'Neill (2013) analyzed results for both frequency and proportion, as we will also report here with respect to the proportion of total maternal utterances (see **Table 2**). In most cases, the proportion results paralleled the frequency results. As such, we only present proportion results when they deviate from the frequency results in terms of patterns of significance. In cases of violations of the assumption of sphericity, we made Greenhouse-Geisser adjustments to the degrees of freedom. Because many of the children in the study produced only single-word utterances, or utterances that were unintelligible, we present only data on mothers' utterances. There were no significant effects of book version (e.g., narrative *Zoo* vs. narrative *Woods)*, order

**Table 1 | Description and examples of the three subcategories for the utterance framing and utterance content categories.**

*\*As described on p. 11, given the nature of the books used, definite singular constructions were more appropriately coded as instances of specific framing rather than generic framing, in contrast to Gelman et al. (2005).*

*\*\*Labels were not included in this level of coding.*

*Means with different superscripts for narrative and non-narrative within each category were significantly different at p < 0.0125.*

of book presentation, or child gender, so all results are analyzed together.

#### **UTTERANCE FRAMING**

To investigate our question of whether book genre influenced the framing of utterances mothers used, we conducted 2 × 3 repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) with book genre (narrative or non-narrative) and utterance framing type (generic, specific, or labeling) as within-subjects factors for both frequency and proportion data.

#### *Frequency*

Results of the frequency ANOVA demonstrated that there was no significant main effect of genre: the narrative (*M* = 18*.*24, *SD* = 8*.*15) and non-narrative genres (*M* = 16.52, *SD* = 5*.*44) did not differ in terms of the average number of animal-referring utterances they elicited, *F*(1*,* 24) = 1*.*46, *p* = 0*.*238, η2 *p* = 0*.*06. There was, however, a difference between the three utterance framing types when combined across genre, *F*(1*.*49*,*35*.*74) = 40*.*94, *p <* 0*.*001, η2 *p* = 0*.*63. To explore this difference in further detail, we conducted *post-hoc t*-tests with a Bonferroni-corrected αvalue of 0.0125, as was the case with all other *post-hoc* tests described below. Collapsing across genre, the frequency of generic statements (*M* = 1*.*62, *SD* = 1*.*29) was significantly lower than the frequency of labels (*M* = 8*.*58, *SD* = 3*.*37), *t*(24) = 11*.*38, *p <* 0*.*001, and the frequency of specific statements (*M* = 7*.*18, *SD* = 3*.*91), *t*(24) = 7*.*29, *p <* 0*.*001. The frequencies of labels and specific statements did not differ significantly, *p* = 0*.*181.

Turning to the main results of interest, we found that the genre by utterance framing type interaction was significant, *F*(2*,* 48) = 6*.*36, *p* = 0*.*004, η2 *p* = 0*.*21. **Figure 1** displays the results of this interaction. The frequency of *generic statements* did not differ significantly between narrative and non-narrative book sharing, *p* = 0*.*791. The frequency of *labels* also did not differ significantly between narrative and non-narrative book sharing, *p* = 0*.*192. The frequency of *specific statements* was significantly greater during narrative book sharing than during non-narrative book sharing, *t*(24) = 5*.*08, *p* = 0*.*004. See **Table 2** for a display of the means of frequency and proportion interactions.

#### *Proportion*

The patterns of significance for the main effects and interaction echoed those for the frequency analysis. Two differences were however found with respect to the *post-hoc t-*tests for the interaction. None of these differences concerned generic statements. First, recall that when comparing frequency, the two genres did

not differ in terms of the mean number of labels they elicited from mothers. However, labeling was significantly greater during nonnarrative book sharing than during narrative book sharing when analyzed as a proportion of total maternal utterances. Second, recall that there were significantly more specific statements during narrative book sharing than during non-narrative book sharing. This difference did not hold when compared as a proportion of *total* utterances (*p* = 0*.*193).

#### *Utterance content*

To investigate our question of whether book genre influenced the content of mothers' utterances, we conducted 2 × 3 repeatedmeasures analyses of variance (ANOVA) with book genre (narrative or non-narrative) and content (physical description, natural fact, or story-specific) as within-subjects factors for both frequency and proportion data.

#### *Frequency*

Of the generic and specific utterances coded further for content, significantly more occurred during narrative book sharing (*M* = 3*.*48, *SD* = 1*.*92) than during non-narrative book sharing (*M* = 2.40, *SD* = 1*.*61), *F*(1*,* 24) = 7*.*42, *p* = 0*.*012, η2 *p* = 0*.*24. There was also a significant difference between the three utterance content categories when combined across genre, *F*(1*.*50*,*35*.*87) = 17*.*13, *p <* 0*.*001, η2 *p* = 0*.*42. Collapsing across book genre, the frequency of story-specific utterances (*M* = 4*.*58, *SD* = 2*.*79) was significantly greater than the frequency of both physical descriptions (*M* = 1*.*74, *SD* = 1*.*54), *t*(24) = 4*.*83, *p <* 0*.*001, and natural facts (*M* = 2*.*50, *SD* = 1*.*61), *t*(24) = 3*.*77, *p* = 0*.*001. The frequencies of natural facts and of physical descriptions were not significantly different when correcting for multiple comparisons, *t*(24) = 2*.*32, *p* = 0*.*029.

Turning to the main results of interest, there was a significant genre by content interaction, *F*(1*.*53*,* 36*.*60) = 35*.*85, *p <* 0*.*001, η2 *p* = 0*.*60. **Figure 2** displays the results of this interaction. We found that mothers' use of physical descriptions was significantly greater during non-narrative book sharing than during narrative book sharing, *t*(24) = 3*.*44, *p* = 0*.*002. Mothers' produced significantly more story-specific utterances during narrative book sharing than during non-narrative book sharing, *t*(24) = 6*.*17,

*p <* 0*.*001. Of most interest, there was no significant difference across genres in the frequency of natural facts, *p* = 0*.*165.

#### *Proportion*

The patterns of significance for the main effects and interaction were the same, regardless of whether the results were analyzed by frequency or proportion of total maternal utterances. It is noted for the reader, that although the proportion of natural facts was higher during non-narrative book sharing than narrative book sharing, the difference was not significant when corrected for multiple comparisons.

### **DISCUSSION**

The influence of placing animal characters in a narrative or nonnarrative picture-book context on mothers' use of certain types of pedagogical language was investigated in the present study. Because the target animals did not differ between the two genres, and each book presented the six target animals' labels as the only text, the key difference was in whether the animals were presented within illustrations depicting a story (narrative condition) or on a blank page (non-narrative condition). There were no differences across genres in terms of the frequency or proportion of total utterances that were about the animals in the books (i.e., animal-referring). Dividing these animal-referring utterances into generic, specific, and labeling subtypes, we found that specific utterances were significantly more common during narrative book sharing. Surprisingly, however, the two genres did not differ in terms of the frequency or proportion of maternal generic utterances that they engendered. When analyzed by proportion, mothers' use of specific utterances did not differ across the two genres, whereas a greater proportion of utterances were labels during non-narrative book sharing. Thus, the key difference between the two genres was in their elicitation of specific and labeling utterances, not, as one might have predicted based on previous studies, generic utterances (e.g., Gelman et al., 2013).

When looking beyond the structure of mothers' utterances, we found differences in the types of content mothers were delivering during narrative and non-narrative book sharing. Whereas the non-narrative books encouraged more physical descriptions, the narratives, somewhat expectedly, encouraged more story-specific utterances that described states of the animals and animal-related actions on the page. The books did not differ, however, in their propensity to encourage natural facts about the animals. Like the non-significant generic finding, this suggests that mothers do not necessarily take a more pedagogical stance during non-narrative book sharing. The natural fact category comprised utterances that provided information about animals' diet, habit, and behaviors. Note that the generic and natural fact categories were neither completely overlapping nor mutually-exclusive. Although natural facts and generic knowledge may be seemingly synonymous, we found that mothers presented natural facts using specific noun phrases on several occasions (e.g., "He (badger) uses his sharp claws and goes dig, dig, dig."). As such, the utterance framing and utterance content codings provide complementary, yet unique information.

The present findings add to a growing body of research indicating that contextual influences, and particularly the format of presentation of animals and objects, can influence the extent to which they are construed and spoken about as individuals or members of a kind (Gelman and Tardif, 1998; Gelman et al., 2005, 2013). Language referencing individuals and kinds differs not only across settings (e.g., objects vs. pictures; Gelman et al., 2005), but also within the book sharing setting, when the nature of the book is manipulated.

#### **THINKING AND TALKING ABOUT INDIVIDUALS AND KINDS**

What do these cross-genre differences in utterance framing and content tell us about how animals are construed in narrative and non-narrative contexts? The narratives, which present animals engaging in unique, intentional activities, appeared to prime mothers to think about the animals mostly as individuals, as reflected in the higher frequency and proportion of specific utterances. In other words, given a depicted event, mothers used specific language to describe it. But generic, kind-referring talk was also notably present during narrative book sharing. What is more intriguing, perhaps, is what mothers did with the nonnarrative books. In a sense, one should have free rein to discuss whatever one likes about a picture of an animal on a page, as there is no need to convey a visual narrative to the child. Mothers provided a mix of physical descriptions, natural facts, and even some story-specific utterances during non-narrative book sharing. They did not appear, however, to treat the animals in the non-narratives as any more representational of their kind than those in the narratives.

Gelman et al. (2005) have argued that labels are more representational of kinds than specific utterances, but we would argue that labels only serve to place an individual in a category and offer little kind-based information if they are not followed with a generic statement. And, our finding that generics did not differ across genres suggests that mothers did not necessarily view animals in the non-narrative as more representational than those in the narrative. If pedagogical contexts do indeed encourage the communication of generic information, as suggested by recent studies (Gelman et al., 2005; Butler and Markman, 2012) and Csibra and Gergely's (2009) theory of natural pedagogy, then one could conclude from the present findings that mothers were not behaving more pedagogically during non-narrative book sharing than during narrative book sharing.

It is difficult to provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether animals were construed as individuals or as members of a kind in the narrative and non-narrative books by mothers, but, for now, the answer seems to be "both." Within each type of book, mothers shifted from describing an animal as a specific individual (e.g., narrative: "He's going to sleep in there, too"; non-narrative: "He kind of looks like a dog") to describing it as a member of a kind (e.g., narrative: "Squirrels eat nuts, don't they?"; non-narrative: "Hyenas laugh, hahaha"). Thus, mothers appear to flexibly consider a single animal as both an individual and as an exemplar when discussing it with their children.

It is worth acknowledging that, relative to other types of talk, the proportion of generics observed in the present study (4–5%) might be considered by readers to be fairly low. However, our observed proportion is similar to that of a previous study with a similar age group (19- to 23-month-olds) (Gelman and Tardif, 1998), in which 4.67% of maternal utterances included generic noun phrases during book sharing. Relative to other contexts (e.g., toy play) and subject matter (e.g., artifacts), the authors found that mothers' use of generic noun phrases was greatest during book sharing about animals. Thus, it would appear that a proportion around 4–5% may be quite typical of book sharing interactions between parents and toddlers. It is likely that as children's comprehension of generic language increases, so too does the amount of generic language they receive in their input. Future research may investigate whether the observed pattern, in which mothers' use of generic language is equivalent across narrative and non-narrative books, holds with slightly older children.

#### **LEARNING FROM NARRATIVES AND NON-NARRATIVES**

Together with our prior finding, using the same data set, that mothers' talk was more complex during narrative book sharing, with more text-to-life references, mental state terms, and non-present tenses, compared to non-narrative (didactic) book sharing (Nyhout and O'Neill, 2013), the present findings suggest that narratives do indeed provide ample stimulus for abstract and pedagogical types of talk, such as generic language and natural facts, previously assumed to fall more within the domain of informational books.

Anecdotally, many parents who have participated in studies in our lab have remarked that storybooks are "just for fun." Comments on websites such as Amazon frequently reflect this sentiment. This view may be widely held, given media reports on declining picture book sales in favor of chapter books and more "educational" books (Bosman, 2010). Our findings suggest however that, when sharing wordless books with their mothers, children are exposed to an equal amount of generic, factual information when the book is a narrative as when it is a non-narrative.

Increasingly, researchers and educators are emphasizing the need for children to be exposed to more informational texts both at home and in the classroom (e.g., Reese and Harris, 1997; Duke, 2000, 2003; Goodwin and Miller, 2013). A common argument is that as children shift from *learning to read* to *reading to learn*, they must have access to books that provide "information about the natural and social world" (Duke, 2003, p. 1). Proponents of increasing children's exposure to informational books generally acknowledge that narratives do have their place, but not as potential sources of world knowledge. A key problem that we see with these views is in the strict dichotomization of narrative and informational texts. As demonstrated in the present study and as found in a content analysis of children's books (Gelman et al., 2013), narratives can and do provide generic information about the natural world. Given that our narrative and nonnarrative books fostered equal numbers of generic utterances, a key consideration for parents hoping to expose their children to more educational materials should be enjoyment. Those books that parents and children find more enjoyable should maintain attention and potentially facilitate greater learning.

The focus of future investigations should now turn to how and what children learn from narrative and non-narrative books, in both controlled experiments and in more open-ended interactions with caretakers. Previous findings are somewhat mixed in terms of whether children are able to learn factual information from fiction (Fazio and Marsh, 2008; Richert et al., 2009; Richert and Smith, 2011). Most relevant to the present study, perhaps, are the mentioned findings by Ganea et al. (2011), who found that children were able to learn and generalize from both factual and intentional picture book formats. How the two types of books, narrative and non-narrative, may differentially support learning should be a focus of future research. Although our narrative and non-narrative books promoted a relatively equal proportion of generic language, it is unknown to what extent the interactions around the two types of books may have fostered short- and long-term *learning* of information about the featured animals.

#### **TODDLERS' REASONING ABOUT ANIMALS AND OBJECTS IN BOOKS**

Three important questions about children's comprehension and reasoning for future research arise from our observations of mothers' shifting use of specific and generic language use during book sharing.

in their home sign system (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2005). However, we do not know what tendency young children have to consider animals in books and pictures and whether narrative context may influence this. It would be of interest to investigate toddlers' and preschoolers' comments about animals in the two types of books when they are asked by a parent or experimenter to provide them.

(3) *Can toddlers shift between representing the same entity as both an individual and as an exemplar?* By the age of three, children are capable of a relevant representational ability: dual representation, the ability to represent a symbol both as standing for something else and as a concrete entity itself (DeLoache, 2000). In the case of the toddlers in our study, the question is whether they can consider the animals in our books both as individual characters carrying out unique activities and as exemplars of a kind. The 3- and 4-year-old children in Ganea et al.'s (2011) study were likely able to represent the animals in the intentional, narrative condition as individual characters and as members of a kind, evidenced by their ability to generalize the information learned. It is unknown whether the toddlers in our study were able to consider the unique activities of the animals on the page (e.g., a squirrel sneaking into a bear's den to keep warm), while also making predictions about the kind-relevant activities the animals must engage in (e.g., collecting and hiding nuts). Many of the children in the present study frequently produced animal sounds for known animals in the books, both spontaneously and when requested by mothers. This suggests that they readily considered the animals on the pages as exemplars of a kind.

#### **CONCLUSION**

Much of the information we possess about the world comes from the books we read, the films we watch, and the people we converse with. Although non-fiction books and documentary films may first come to mind when one thinks about the genres of media that are likely to provide natural facts about the world, the present findings suggest that both narrative and non-narrative children's picture books stimulate such pedagogical talk from mothers. While the narrative books promoted more references to individual characters, the non-narrative books elicited more instances of labels. Surprisingly, the two types of books encouraged similar amounts of generic talk about kinds of animals and talk about natural facts. Based on these findings, we leave the reader with one final piece of generic information: picture book stories aren't just for fun; they're for learning, too.

### **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

This research was supported in part by a Research Development Initiative grant awarded to author Daniela K. O'Neill from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

#### **REFERENCES**

Price, L. H., van Kleeck, A., and Huberty, C. J. (2009). Talk during book sharing between parents and preschool children: a comparison between storybook and expository book conditions. *Read. Res. Q.* 44, 171–194. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.44.2.4

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 25 November 2013; accepted: 28 March 2014; published online: April 2014. 16*

*Citation: Nyhout A and O'Neill DK (2014) Storybooks aren't just for fun: narrative and non-narrative picture books foster equal amounts of generic language during mother-toddler book sharing. Front. Psychol. 5:325. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00325*

*This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Nyhout and O'Neill. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

## Clues cue the smooze: rhyme, pausing, and prediction help children learn new words from storybooks

## *Kirsten Read\**

*Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA*

#### *Edited by:*

*Carmel Houston-Price, University of Reading, UK*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Hanako Yoshida, University of Houston, USA Sarah Creel, University of California at San Diego, USA*

*\*Correspondence: Kirsten Read, Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Rhyme, which is ubiquitous in the language experiences of young children, may be especially facilitative to vocabulary learning because of how it can support active predictions about upcoming words. In two experiments, we tested whether rhyme, when used to help children anticipate new words would make those words easier to learn. Two- to 4-year-old children heard rhyming stanzas naming novel monsters under three conditions: A non-rhyme condition in which novel monster names appeared as unrhymed elements within a rhymed stanza, a non-predictive rhyme condition in which the novel names were the rhymed element in the first line of a stanza, and a predictive rhyme condition in which the monster name came as the rhymed element in the last line of the stanza after a description of the features that distinguished him. In tests of retention and identification children showed greatest novel name learning in the predictive rhyme condition in both between-subjects (Experiment 1) and within-subjects (Experiment 2) comparisons. Additionally, when parents acted as the storybook readers in Experiment 2, many of them distinctly paused before target words in the predictive rhyme condition and for their children a stronger predictive rhyme advantage surfaced. Thus rhyme is not only facilitative for learning, but when the novel vocabulary is specifically in a position where it is *predictable* from the rhymes, it is most accessible.

**Keywords: shared storybook reading, word learning, vocabulary growth, rhyme, predictable language, preschoolers**

#### **INTRODUCTION**

Recently, my 3-year-old son asked, "Guess what's in my pocket?" then paused for a beat and exclaimed, "a wocket!" And, while thankfully there was not actually a small Seussian monster in his pants, my son had reminded me of just how well he is able to learn words (even nonsense words) from storybooks, and in fact just how strongly rhyme must influence that process.

Shared storybook reading is a triangular interaction—the adult reader, the child, and the book conspire to create a meaningful experience each time a book is shared; and one of the many benefits for young children who regularly share in storybooks with their parents is the positive impact that has on their vocabulary growth (Senechal et al., 1996; DeTemple and Snow, 2003; Blewitt et al., 2009; Farrant and Zubrick, 2013). Books present new words to young listeners, parents actively highlight those new words, expand on them, and help to make them memorable for the child (e.g., Clark, 2010). Even in the earliest years caregivers use storybooks as a vehicle for pointing out new vocabulary (Ninio, 1983; Moerk, 1985; Fletcher and Reese, 2005), but for 2 to 5-year-olds in a rapid period of word learning, storybook reading is the perfect opportunity to hear an abundance of new words in engaging contexts, and to take part in questions and conversations which promote vocabulary learning (Ard and Beverly, 2004; Blewitt et al., 2009).

Of course, the connection between storybook reading and vocabulary growth is not always a simple one. Learning words from books is mediated by many factors—the frequency of reading (Bus et al., 1995; Senechal and LeFevre, 2002), the age when regular storybook reading begins (DeBaryshe, 1993; Senechal and LeFevre, 2002), the word-knowledge children bring to the experience (Senechal et al., 1995; Hindman et al., 2008; Blewitt et al., 2009), the style of adult readers including the amount of elaboration on the meaning of new words (Ard and Beverly, 2004; Justice et al., 2005), and the complexity of adult readers' elaborations and questions about the book while reading (Whitehurst et al., 1988; Reese et al., 2003; Hindman et al., 2008; Blewitt et al., 2009). Typically, a more dialogic reading style by parents with openended questions, elaborations and repetitions which encourages the child to comment on the book (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1988, 1994) can lead to better vocabulary learning. For instance, Ard and Beverly (2004) found that children learned more novel words from storybooks when they heard extra comments or questions about those words during the reading session. Hindman et al.'s (2008) longitudinal study of preschoolers reading with parents and teachers went one step further. They discovered that it was not just extra talk about the meanings of new words that affected word learning, but specifically talk that prompted children to recall, predict, and make inferences when reading stories that predicted gains in children's vocabulary. Thus, simply hearing new words in storybooks can help a child learn those words, but *actively* engaging with the words seems to provide an extra memory and learning boost.

So while we have amassed research on the role adult readers play in promoting word learning from storybooks and what characteristics of children may make them more receptive, we know much less about how the third part of this interaction, the book itself, helps to encourage word learning. Do some books prompt more active engagement on the part of the child? Are there features of certain types of books that might encourage more questions, more predictions, or simply more memorable words? In particular, what difference does rhyme, a ubiquitous storybook feature, make in helping children grow their vocabulary?

Almost thirty years ago, Moerk (1985) speculated on the potential benefits of rhyme, which, like repetition, increases predictability, and may thereby "simplify the analysis of the input for the child" (p. 553) making it easier for children to remember words from a story. He had observed mothers capitalizing on the predictability of rhyme when reading with children in a "testing and feedback" phenomenon that involved deliberately producing incomplete utterances leaving off the last word of a rhyme so that children could easily supply it (Moerk, 1972), yet he did not measure the effects of this kind of interaction on how well children might retain those rhyming words in their vocabulary. In fact, despite the ubiquity of rhyme in the life of a preschooler and the intuitions of parents and teachers (e.g., Kenney, 2005), only a small amount of empirical research has looked at whether children's books written in verse affect what is learned from them.

Rhyme is so common in the modern child's experience of shared storybook reading that we sometimes overlook it, but in a recent local survey of 160 parents of 2- to 4-year-old children, parents reported that on average rhyming books make up 38% of their home libraries, and of their own favorite books to read to their children 48% were rhyming (Read, Unpublished raw data). In fact, 20 of the "Top 100 children's books of all-time" (2013) for children ages 0–5 are in verse. Thus, a child who is read to regularly could be hearing hundreds of hours of rhymed language before the end of preschool. Children don't just hear a lot of rhyme they also clearly enjoy it. In Hayes et al.'s (1982) experiments, which pitted rhymed versus unrhymed versions of stories against one another for the purpose of testing children's recall, regardless of how well children remembered them, they consistently *liked* the rhyming versions of the stories significantly more than the prose versions. This seems unsurprising as it fits anecdotally with the first-hand experience of parents, teachers, and children's book writers, but *what* is the advantage to rhyme over prose besides the delight in it?

Experience with rhymes, whether gleaned from storybooks or simply recited orally, does correlate positively with other measures of language development. In a meta-analysis of 12 studies with 5299 3- to 6-year-olds, Dunst et al. (2011) found that nursery rhyme measures (e.g., knowledge of, or experience with specific nursery rhymes) were positively associated with several phonological and pre-literacy measures. The link from rhymes to reading outcomes is assumed to proceed through heightening phonological sensitivity (e.g., Bryant et al., 1989; Hayes, 2011). But our own query is more specific—could rhymes help foster language development because they make the vocabulary within them more predictable and thus easier to remember?

Two researchers in the last 40 years who have directly compared what children remember from prose vs. rhyming stories have found different things: Hayes and colleagues found 4- to 6-year-olds were hampered by rhyme when asked to recall the specific events of a story (Hayes et al., 1982; Johnson and Hayes, 1987; Hayes, 1999). However, Sheingold and Foundas (1978) found that 6-year-olds recalled just as many details of a story when they heard rhyming vs. prose versions, but that the rhymed stories gave children an advantage in memory for the sequence of events. In addition, children recalled more of the specific rhyming words of stories compared to other details (Hayes et al., 1982) and demonstrated better verbatim recall (Johnson and Hayes, 1987) despite decrements in overall paraphrase abilities.

Recently our own work has investigated the effects of rhymed versus unrhymed stories on 2- to 4-year-old children's ability to recall familiar animal names from a parent–child storybook reading session (Read and Macauley, submitted). We found not only that children remembered more target words when they had been presented in a rhymed story, but also that parents reading rhymed versions of the story would pause longer before naming a target animal and that in concert children would spontaneously guess the name of the animal during such pauses with significantly higher accuracy in the rhyming condition. Just as Moerk (1972) observed, a parent in this study would read *My floppy ears might look quite funny/if I were a hopping. . .* allowing the child time to supply *bunny!*, and then at the end of the book *bunny* was more easily recalled in this rhyme version than in a unrhymed version about the very same rabbit. This highlighted the way that rhyme supports predictability, but also how that predictability might be making the words themselves more memorable. Thus, rhyme, as well as being potentially engaging and playful, may be especially facilitative for recall because of how it can support active predictions about upcoming words.

Thus if rhyme is helpful to children for remembering such predictable familiar words, the question that follows is whether it could also aid in learning *new* words. This may be the case because stories written in verse increase the amount of overall predictability in the phrases children hear. Rhyme builds up an expectation for the sounds of upcoming words even if they are unfamiliar, and added to other cues like the story narrative or illustrations, can give a child clues about the form of a novel word at the end of a line even before it is read.

Recent research demonstrates how predictability gives children an edge in language comprehension and language learning. When words are predictable, for example when they are placed in frequent frames (Fernald and Hurtado, 2006) or common phrases like *brush your. . .teeth* (Arnon and Clark, 2011) or contextually specific phrases like *the pirate buried the. . .treasure* (Borovsky et al., 2012) then those words can be anticipated and identified more rapidly (Fernald and Hurtado, 2006; Borovsky et al., 2012) and produced correctly more often (Arnon and Clark, 2011). Predictability also influences how well children learn novel words. Ramscar et al. (2010) demonstrated the importance for word learners (whether they are children, adults, or computer models) of sequencing information in a way that facilitates prediction. They found that when a novel label is *preceded by* the discriminating features of a novel object then that label can be learned more easily, meaning that the most supportive thing we can do to teach a new word is to name it *after* the features that predict it.

Could a similar kind of predictability, the kind that rhyme adds to language as a redundant cue to the relevant features and the sound of a new word, also make that new word more memorable, and thus more learnable? The present study was designed to look not just at whether rhyme would aid memory for words from storybooks, but whether the specific way in which the rhyme sets up those new words would make a difference to how well children could retain and learn them. If rhyme makes words more memorable simply because it makes a storybook more engaging, then it would not matter where a new word was placed within a rhyming stanza, that word should still receive a boost. If rhyme makes words more memorable simply by highlighting them phonologically through the repetition of sound, then only novel words that are rhymed elements themselves should benefit. However, if the *predictability* that the rhyme creates is what boosts memory and learning then where the novel word is placed within a stanza should matter—putting the new word in the most predictable place at the end of the stanza after drawing attention to the novel features that distinguish it, and setting up an expectation for what it should sound like should be most beneficial for remembering and learning that new word. Thus, in two experiments we attempted to teach young children the novel names of several unfamiliar monsters under each kind of rhyming condition—one in which the monster name, though embedded within a rhyme, was not a rhyming element itself; one in which the monster name was a rhyming element but it was the first one heard; and one condition in which the monster name was the last rhyming element in a four-line stanza meant to provide the maximal amount of predictability.

## **EXPERIMENT 1 METHODS** *Participants*

Twenty-six 2- to 4-year-old children participated (Mage = 39 months, *SD* = 9*.*5 months). Eighteen participants were girls and eight were boys. All were learning English as their primary language without any reported language delays or disabilities. Children were recruited through an on-campus preschool in Santa Clara, California, and tended to be from homes in which parents were college-educated and of moderate to high income levels. Children were randomly assigned to each of three conditions resulting in equal distribution of ages and genders among groups. **Table 1** illustrates the age and gender breakdown of each condition group. We conducted a one-way analysis of variance in order to test for any significant difference in ages among condition groups, and found none, F*(*2*,*23*)* = 0*.*518, *p* = 0*.*602. One additional child participated but was excluded from all analyses due to inattentiveness and failure to participate in answering the test questions.

#### **Table 1 | Age and Gender breakdown of each Condition Group in Experiment 1.**

#### *Materials*