Poster #112 - Book reading vs puzzle play: Word usage and word learning in different parent-child play settings

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Children acquire language through daily interactions with caregivers and peers. Much attention has been given to storybook reading as a particularly effective medium for language learning (Dickinson, Griffith, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2012; Sénéchal, 1997), but children and their caregivers interact in many different settings outside of reading books. In addition, a number of studies have demonstrated that aspects of the parent-child interaction (e.g., turn taking, parental responsiveness, joint attention) are also influential for word learning, (Dunham, Dunham, & Curwin, 1993; Gilkerson, Richards, & Warren, 2017; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001). In order to study the impact of different language learning mediums, the quality of the interactions they facilitate, and their impact on word learning, here we examine 2-3-year-old children interacting with their parents in two common everyday contexts: reading a storybook or playing with a 3D puzzle.
Fifty-six children between 30 and 48 months of age (M=37.61, SD=5.73) were assigned to one of two between subject interaction conditions: book or puzzle. Both the book and the puzzle contained the same 12 target words, all depicting concrete nouns not usually known at this age (e.g., binoculars, walrus, pyramid). We hypothesize that (a) in contrast to the relatively scripted nature of book reading, the more open-ended context of constructing a puzzle will facilitate higher quality interactions, for example in terms of the balance of parent and child involvement and (b) higher quality interactions will, in turn, result in better word learning. We assessed the quality of the parent-child interactions by measuring the number of times target words are uttered by the parent and by the child. Additionally, we collected parent reports on whether their child knew each target word prior to the study. Lastly, we measured the child’s learning of the target words by testing their comprehension and production of each word after the play phase.
A two-way ANOVA revealed a significant interaction between speaker and interaction condition on target word usage such that parents exhibit more utterances in the book condition than they do in the puzzle condition, whereas children’s word usage does not differ between conditions (See Figure 1). Despite this difference in word usage, word learning performance scores were not found to significantly differ between interaction conditions, t(52)=0.654, p=.516, with children in both conditions performing above chance. However, our results do indicate a significant correlation between child utterances and production scores after controlling for age, productive vocabulary score, and the number of target words that the child knew previously (see figure 2). The fact that children learn the target words equally well in both settings (by an average 4.22 words learned over the number of words they came in knowing) suggests that regardless of the medium, the ideal parent-child interaction is one that encourages the child to say more target words. Thus, as long as parents participate in these types of high quality interactions with their children, other language learning mediums besides reading storybooks can be effective in encouraging word learning among young children.

Authors

• Andrew Joseph Mertens, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Mary Roszel, University of Colorado Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eliana Colunga, University of Colorado-Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author