Journal article
Book language and its implications for children’s language, literacy, and development
- Abstract:
- The onset of literacy marks a significant change in children’s development. Written language is more complex than everyday conversation, and even books targeted at preschoolers contain more varied words and more complex syntax than child-directed speech does. We review the nature and content of children’s book language, focusing on recent large-scale corpus analyses that systematically compared written and spoken language. We argue that exposure to book language provides opportunities for learning words and syntactic constructions that are only rarely encountered in speech and that, in turn, this rich experience drives further developments in language and literacy. Moreover, we speculate that the range, variety, depth, and sophistication of book language provide key input that promotes children’s social and emotional development. Becoming literate changes things, and researchers need to better understand how and why reading experience shapes people’s minds and becomes associated with a range of skills and abilities across the life span.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 156.9KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1177/09637214221103264
Authors
+ British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship
More from this funder
- Funding agency for:
- Hsiao, Y
- Grant:
- PF2/180013
- Publisher:
- SAGE Publications
- Journal:
- Current Directions in Psychological Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 375-380
- Publication date:
- 2022-07-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-05-10
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1467-8721
- ISSN:
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0963-7214
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1258886
- Local pid:
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pubs:1258886
- Deposit date:
-
2022-05-12
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Nation et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
- Notes:
- A correction to this article is available online from SAGE Publications at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221119448
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