Learning of Pseudowords by Children of Different Ages in a Shared Book Reading Context

Abstract

Shared book reading favors incidental learning of vocabulary; however, studies indicate that the previous vocabulary level of the child interferes with learning. The aim of this study was to compare the learning relations between pseudowords and figures of children aged 3 and 7 years in a shared book reading situation and to investigate the possible occurrence of the Matthew Effect. A book with four pseudowords developed for this study was read three consecutive times to 10 children of each age group. Matching-to-sample, exclusion, naming, and description of the use probes were applied immediately after the reading and one week later. No significant differences were found between the performances of both groups, except for the exclusion probes, without incidence of the Matthew Effect. Learning words is a continuous process that involves frequency and contexts of exposure to the words.

Learning Pseudowords Through Shared Storybook Reading And Auditory-Visual Pairing

“…This result may indicate that implicit vocabulary teaching through story reading is efficient depending on the number of unknown word-picture relations. Vaz and Schmidt (2019) have shown that teaching four new word-picture relations through reading books is very difficult, even for older children (aged 7 years). The results discussed here suggest that the learning of two new relations is similar under explicit and implicit teaching conditions; however, a larger number of relations may require explicit teaching strategies, such as auditory-visual pairing, for example.…”