Next up is @ReadOxford - looking at children's book language and children's language and literacy development. #NAPLIC21
variation in language matters for academic and socioemotional development, long term prospects. More language in preschool -> better language later. Input matters #NAPLIC21
More shared reading --> better language skills. Stronger reading and writing skills. Causality sometimes difficult to pin down. Reading brings emotional connection, joint attention, turn taking, etc. However, focus here is on book language. #NAPLIC21
spoken language often situational - focusing on the here and now. supported by gestures. Written language different - decontextualised. Messages need to communicated more clearly. more syntactically complex and lexically diverse. More formal, academic and literary. #NAPLIC21
Reading brings in new vocabulary not often heard in every day life. When do differences in book language start? Aee early books more conversational? When do the differences become apparent. #NAPLIC21
created a large corpus of books aimed a preschoolers. Collect the language content and compare to child directed speech. Measure and quantify lexical richness, lexical diversity, density and sophistication. identify words that uniquely occur in books. #NAPLIC21
160 children's books 0-7. 320,000 words. Best seller and recommended lists. compared this to CHILDES database. 10 Corpora from English-UK section of the database #NAPLIC21
lexical richness - quality of words in language sample. Book language more diverse than spoken language. Lexical density - proportion of words with meaning (nouns, etc.) relative to function works. Picture words more dense than spoken language? #NAPLIC21
Lexical sophistication - unique words relative to language corpus. more rare words in book language than spoken language. Length of words longer in book language than spoken language. morphologically complexity higher in book than language corpus #NAPLIC21
What words are most representative of book language? what kind of words will children miss out on if shared book reading is low? keyword analysis - frequency of book vs spoken corpus. top and bottom 500 words. #NAPLIC21
Examples given of words more representative in book language and more representative in spoken language. Book language - mutter, shout, enormous. Spoken language - yeah, mmm, alright. #NAPLIC21
Book words are acquired later in development. Later Age of Acquisition. but lots of overlap. Book words tend to be more abstract and less concrete than spoken language. book words are rated as more emotional arousing qualities. #NAPLIC21
Book language provides unique language input for children. Will next discuss syntactic complexity and book language. early study of 20 books for 2 year olds. Books were more grammatical complex than speech to 2 year old children. Interesting at such a young age. #NAPLIC21
Kate looked at this in her corpus, so the picture book and spoken language corpus discussed above. Matching age across the books and language input corpus. Also looked at the Oxford Children's Corpus - targetted 5-14 year olds. #NAPLIC21
Looked at relative clauses - type of complex grammar. Adult written language contains more relative clauses than spoken languages. How does sensitivity to this usage develop? #NAPLIC21
reading books contained more relative clauses than picture books and speech. Picture books contained more relative clauses than speech. Some relative clauses rare in child directed speech. We see a developmental change as the books target older children #NAPLIC21
Book language provides experiences with syntactic structures children often don't hear of in the child directed speech. Once children can read or listen to work, the advantage for learning starts. Book language may help understand the language gap #NAPLIC21
Data is correlational, not causal. Next project is looking at causality. Stories created that mirror differences found in corpus results. Manipulating context of language - figure out what children learn from the stories. The study is soon to begin data collection #NAPLIC21
They are looking for participants soon - early years educators consider reaching out to @ReadOxford. #NAPLIC21
Making the point that oral language is the basis for both decoding and linguistic comprehension skills that feed into reading comprehension. Importance of bidirectional links between oral language and literacy skills/book language. #NAPLIC21
Lack of book reading in early years leaves children at a disadvantage, which might become wider as children continue to not engage in book reading. #NAPLIC21
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