Shared book reading and the influence of echoic behavior on 5 years old children’s vocabulary learning

• Grant number: 15/03556-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2015
• End date: April 30, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Andréia Schmidt
• Grantee: Letícia Melo de Paulo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ribeirão Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Many research reported that shared book reading improves the children's communication and their academic results because it helps the comprehension of unknown words, leading to a higher possibility of learning those. However, it is still not clear which variables could make this kind of learning easier, although some studies indicate that echoic behavior could possibly facilitate it. Considering that, this project aims to investigate if echoic behavior helps the process of word learning in different conditions. For that, 18 5-years-old children will be divided in 3 groups and each of them will be submitted to a different condition. On the first condition (Reading Only), the story will be read twice in a row. On the second (Echoic Only), the story won't be read and the child will be submitted twice to an auditory-visual conditional relation and, after listening to the name of the object showed in the figure, will emit an echoic behavior. On the third condition (Reading and Echoic), the researcher will read the story once and will ask the participant to emit an echoic behavior for each pseudoword presented. On the three conditions, each pseudoword will be presented 6 times in order to control the number of its exposition. A story, appropriate for the age of the children, was written specifically for this study and it contains invented and concrete nouns (pseudowords). Immediately after the procedures, the researcher will check immediate learning of the new vocabulary, on the first experimental session and after seven days, will verify the consolidation of learning, on the second experimental session. The data of the three groups will be analyzed and compared in order to investigate the controlled variables.