Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Rhyme And Word Placement In Storybooks Support High-Level Verb Mapping In 3- To 5-Year-Olds, Kirsten Read, Jacqueline Quirke

Psychology

High-level verbs can be especially challenging for young children to initially map to meaning. This study manipulated the format of a storybook designed to support such verb learning from shared reading. We tested whether 3- to 5-year-olds (n = 38) could remember the referents of eight new verbs when presented as essential actions within a narrative story but with differences in placement. Children were randomly assigned to either a rhymed condition, in which target verbs were heard at the end of rhyming stanzas making them maximally appreciable, or a control condition, where the verbs were presented in the same …