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Photographs vs. Illustrations
Which Picture Books Help Baby Learn Best?
By Teri Brown
The different ways that babies take in and process information is perennially fascinating. The amount of learning they do by age 5 is staggering, and parents and researchers alike never get tired of figuring out just how children accomplish this.
A recent study conducted by Dr. Judy S. DeLoache from the University of Virginia and Gabrielle Simcock from the University of Queensland, sheds new light on how children process symbolic information from picture books.
Parents know how invaluable picture books can be to their child's development, and reading to children has become a favored pastime. Parents use reading time as a way to teach their children and to spend quality time with them, but little is known about how much children actually gain from this practice.
Dr. DeLoache says this is why she is fascinated by the topic and conducted the study. "I, along with colleagues and students, have recently conducted several studies of very young children's learning from picture books," Dr. DeLoache says. "In some of these studies, we varied the nature of the pictures in the books. In particular, we compared how well children learned the names of novel objects from books with highly realistic photos of the objects versus less realistic paintings or drawings."
The researchers did this by making special books containing several familiar objects (ball, doll, etc.), as well as two completely unfamiliar objects that the children had never seen. During the book reading interaction, a researcher "read" the book to the child, naming one of the novel objects with a novel label (e.g., "blicket") several times, but never naming the other.
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