Poster #112 - Sing it to me! Evaluating whether songs facilitate word learning in young children

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Young children acquire some music and language skills in parallel. Previous work suggests that music and language skills are matched in their speed and effort of development, and are quite entangled with each other since very early in life (Brandt, Gebrian, & Slevc, 2012). For example, young infants display cyclical positive responses to hearing their mother singing, and these interactions are thought to provide a foundation for shared communication and language-related skills such as turn-taking (De l’Etoile, 2006). In recent years music interventions and learning-through-song programs (including those that target vocabulary learning) for children of various ages have increasingly gained popularity. Yet more empirical data are needed to support this type of approaches. This study explores whether young children can, in fact, acquire novel words better through songs compared to spoken language.

In a laboratory task, typically-developing toddlers (mean age: 26.8 months) were taught two new words (e.g., doop and fim) that corresponded to novel objects. One of the words was trained using a spoken sentence produced in child-directed speech prosody (e.g., Look it’s a doop! Wow, it’s a doop! Do you see it? A doop!). The second word was trained by the same voice, but this time the sentences were sung to the melody of “Old Mac Donald Had A Farm”. Immediately after training, children were tested on their ability to recognize each item using a split-screen Preferential Looking Paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987). The overall design was identical to the one used by Newman et al. (2018) to examine word learning in children of a similar age. All sessions were videotaped and coded offline by researchers who were blind to condition. Analyses focus on comparing the proportion of time spent looking at the appropriate object to a measure of chance performance (in this case 50%), as well as comparing the proportion of time spent looking at the correct object for the item trained in the “Spoken” compared to the “Song” condition.

To date, data from 10 children (7f, 3m) have been coded and analyzed, and suggest that performance is significantly above chance for words trained in both the Spoken (p<.001), and the Song (p<.05) conditions (Figure 1). Surprisingly, accuracy appears to be higher for words trained in sentences that were Spoken (60%) compared to in a Song (55%). Nevertheless, the difference between conditions is not significant (p=0.23) with this preliminary sample size. Data from additional children will be available for the conference in March. The present study is one of the first to focus on the effect of music and song on vocabulary learning. So far our findings suggest that contrary to popular belief, hearing words as part of a song might not necessarily facilitate word learning – at least not in 27-month-olds. One possibility is that this pattern varies with development, and that perhaps younger children who are less experienced at learning word-object relations would benefit from some features included in song (e.g., the melody of the song helping maintain attention during the task).

Authors

• Giovanna Morini, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author

• Emily Fritzson, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mackensie Blair, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author