Learning, Cognition, & Development Lab

Last weekend, Ashley and Yi presented their projects at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders (SRCLD) at the Menona Terrace in Madison, Wisconsin. Ashley presented her poster “Can Parents Accurately Report Children’s Use of Words with Multiple Word Meanings” and Yi presented her poster “Characterizing Relations Between Preschoolers’ Science Vocabulary and Educational Media Use.” Their contributions highlighted impact of the LCD lab’s work on understanding early vocabulary and learning.

Several weeks ago, one of our PhD students, Ashley Reece, successfully defended her master’s thesis titled “Do Storybooks Promote Children’s Learning of Concrete and Abstract Science Nouns?”. Her research explored how young children learn new science concepts through storybook reading, a method that is both engaging and integral to their language development.

Science concepts can be challenging for young children to learn due to their abstractness and the abundance of many new words. Ashley’s thesis aimed to address this challenge by designing and testing a science book storybook from scratch. She examined whether 4- and 5-year-old children could learn specific science-related words – mixture, chemist, journal, supplies, theory, effect, result, and interest – through storybook reading. Additionally, children completed a memory task to assess their retention of these words. While Ashley’s findings suggested that the memory demands of her storybook may have been too high for children to successfully learn the words, this research has provided a foundation for future research. As a next step, Ashley is creating a new storybook with plans to decrease the memory demands of the book by teaching children fewer science words.