Book Language & Children’s Reading
My research on sentence comprehension in adults has emphasized the importance of experience in becoming a good comprehender and reader. A natural next step is to consider how children gain this experience as they learn to read and practice reading.
A key component of children’s experience is their familiarity with “book language,” the particular patterns of words, sentence structures, and storytelling conventions that are characteristic of books for children. These book language patterns are very different from what children experience from the speech they hear.
The Seidenberg and MacDonald (2018) paper is an introduction to how children learn the patterns of book language words and sentences, with examples from popular children’s books. The Montag and MacDonald (2015) paper investigates how to measure book language experience (also called text exposure) in children and identifies effects of book language exposure on both children’s and adults’ language. The Brown et al. and Edwards et al. papers investigate another kind of individual difference, the dialect of English that a child grows up learning.
* Indicates that the article offers review, new theory, or response to other researchers.
Published Articles on Book Language & Children’s Reading
*Seidenberg, M.S. & MacDonald, M.C. (2018).
The impact of language experience on language and reading: A statistical learning approach.
Topics in Language Disorders, 38, 66-83.
Montag, J.L. & MacDonald, M.C. (2015).
Text exposure predicts spoken production of complex sentences in eight and twelve-year old children and adults.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 447-468.
Brown, M., Sibley, D., Washington, J., Rogers, T.T., Edwards, J.R., MacDonald, M.C., & Seidenberg. M.S. (2015).
Impact of dialect use on a basic component of learning to read.
Frontiers in Psychology. 6:196.
Edwards, J., Gross, M., Chen, J., MacDonald, M.C., Kaplan, D., Brown, M., & Seidenberg, M.S. (2014).
Dialect awareness and lexical comprehension of Mainstream American English in African American English-speaking children.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57, 1883-1895.