Rhyme over time: Vocabulary learning through daily reading aloud at home with children

Abstract

There is robust evidence that reading aloud with young children can help them learn new vocabulary. Building upon prior research, this study tested the effects of both book text features and readers’ spontaneous extra-textual word-highlighting strategies on 3- to 4-year-olds’ vocabulary retention from repeated read alouds of a story in their own homes. Parent–child dyads (n = 30) were provided with either a rhymed or unrhymed version of the same story featuring novel names and illustrations of eight imaginary monsters, along with an audio recorder to take home. Parents recorded reading the book aloud with their child daily for five consecutive days, then children were tested on their monster name recall. Recordings of each dyad’s five progressive read alouds were transcribed, and coded for conversational elements and novel word-highlighting strategies. Findings indicate that children retained the novel monster names with equal success from rhymed and unrhymed books. While individual variation among dyads in their extra-textual commentary was high, each tended to adopt a consistent amount while reading the book across days in both rhymed and unrhymed formats, even as they became more familiar. The one extra-textual vocabulary highlighting behavior during readings that was most predictive of children’s later monster name recall was their own frequency of making guesses of the monster names before they were heard during the read alouds. A close look at the interactions between book format, book familiarity, and the extra-textual commentary around a storybook, and the implications of these interactions for vocabulary building are discussed.

Keywords

Shared reading rhyme word learning extra-textual talk dialogic reading

The ordinary act of reading a book aloud with a young child is an extraordinarily rich opportunity for supporting early language learning. In the study of early childhood education and language development, there is robust evidence of the unique importance of frequent and high-quality shared reading with preschool-aged children for supporting vocabulary growth and other foundational language skills. When adults read aloud with young children, it promotes an array of oral language and pre-literacy skills, including children’s acquisition of new words (e.g. DeBaryshe, 1993; Sénéchal et al., 2008; Whitehurst et al., 1988; Zauche et al., 2016).

One of the best foundations for strong language and literacy skills in early childhood is building breadth and depth of vocabulary (Dickinson et al., 2019). Shared book reading is beneficial for exposing children to new words in context above and beyond everyday conversation (Dawson et al., 2021), and for supporting children’s learning of those new words (Farrant & Zubrick, 2013; Flack et al., 2018; Sénéchal & Cornell, 1993). As shared reading functions as a triangular interaction between book, reader, and child (e.g. Read, 2014), support for children’s vocabulary learning can come from both the text of the book itself and how that text is read aloud and commented on by the reader. Young children’s vocabulary growth is reliably associated with the frequency of shared book reading at home, even when controlling for variables like socio-economic status and home language (Raikes et al., 2006; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2014; Sénéchal et al., 1996; Shahaeian et al., 2018). One reason why shared reading is such a valuable support for vocabulary learning is that it encourages high levels of engagement between the adult reader and child. Gilkerson et al. (2017) found that shared reading sessions featured higher adult word counts and a greater amount of conversational turns than parent–child conversation throughout the rest of the day. In turn, more overall talk and more opportunities for conversational back-and-forth between adult caregivers and children during read alouds have been found to positively correlate with children’s vocabulary gains (Flack et al., 2018; Korat et al., 2018). For example, in a meta-analysis of 38 studies of children’s word learning from shared reading, Flack et al. (2018) found that the use of dialogic reading styles (defined as ‘adding something to a verbatim text reading,’ such as extra-textual repetitions or explanations or definitions of words), results in children learning 1.22 more words than nondialogic reading (i.e. reading the text aloud verbatim). Thus, it is clear that frequent and interactive reading with children, which includes going beyond simply reading the text aloud is generally beneficial to vocabulary building. There is still a need, however, for closer examination of the specific ways that new words encountered in the text are introduced and attended to within the shared reading context that can make them memorable and learnable for young children.

Understanding how shared reading contributes to children’s word learning involves more careful study of the choices that readers make when they come across words that are new for the child, and how those choices impact children’s attention to and retention of those new words. There are several things that readers can do to highlight new words effectively. Vocabulary learning from shared reading is supported when adults read interactively or dialogically, by going beyond the text of the book to engage the child (Flack et al., 2018), particularly by asking questions, both simple (e.g. ‘Where’s the dog?’) and more complex (e.g. ‘What do you think will happen next?’; Ewers & Brownson, 1999; Roberts et al., 2005; Whitehurst et al., 1988), and by re-reading the same book to increase familiarity (Horst et al., 2011; Robbins & Ehri, 1994; Sénéchal, 1997). In addition, specifically highlighting challenging or unfamiliar words in various ways, such as dramatically pausing before new words (Read, 2014; Read et al., 2019), repeating, defining, or explaining them (Elley, 1989; Korat et al., 2018), or even directly asking questions and making comments about the new words in the book (Blewitt et al., 2009; Justice, 2002; Sénéchal, 1997) can increase children’s retention of those new words highlighted from the book while reading. While many read-aloud strategies appear to bolster young children’s vocabulary learning from shared reading, little research has closely examined the spontaneous, natural use of different strategies for highlighting new words within caregiver–child shared reading in the home, nor compared the use of specific strategies based on the type of language used already in the text of the book being read.

Why might the type of language within a book matter for the kinds of strategies readers use to highlight new vocabulary? Highly structured language in the text (e.g. metered, rhyming, repetitively structured) may prompt different amounts or types of extra-textual commentary or word highlighting from the reader based on the perceived predictability and ‘interruptability’ of the text. For example, dramatic pausing, a subtle but common strategy that invites the child to guess or fill in new vocabulary, may be especially helpful for engaging a child in a read aloud and also for drawing their attention to specific words, making those words more memorable (e.g. Read et al., 2014, 2019); The strategy of dramatic pausing to encourage a child to supply a word or even just to orient a child’s attention to what is about to come next (e.g. Fraundorf & Watson, 2011) may be especially beneficial when it highlights new words at the end of a sentence or page in the text (Evans et al., 2011; Read et al., 2014, 2019); Furthermore, pausing is one of the few strategies known to differ depending on book language type. Read et al. (2014) found that parents reading with their preschool-aged children were more likely to dramatically pause to let their child guess an animal name in rhymed versus unrhymed versions of the same story. A possible explanation for this finding is that when reading a rhymed book, there are more cues to which word could fill in the pause, and thus, the child might be more likely to make a guess (Read et al., 2022; Read & Regan, 2018), and thus, the strategy of using dramatic pauses to encourage children’s engagement becomes easy to adopt with rhyming books.

There is additional evidence that rhyming books can bolster new vocabulary learning due to their more highly structured text. Rhyme provides a boost to specific vocabulary within the text when new words are heard at the end of rhyming stanzas (e.g. Read, 2014; Read & Quirke, 2018). Thus, rhyme and placement are apparently adding a highlight to novel vocabulary when used together to orient the child’s attention to the new word. The question that follows from these findings, is whether adult readers in natural settings also respond differently to rhymed versus unrhymed books when reading aloud with a child. To our knowledge, only Read et al. (2014) investigated differences in how parents might spontaneously read rhymed versus unrhymed versions of the same book differently, finding that on average, parents were more inclined to pause prior to reading the target vocabulary when reading a rhyming book to their children. This finding may suggest that adult readers respond to that ‘invitation’ from the structure of the text to use the predictability of rhyme and the opportunity to pause and comment on a word at the end of a rhyming stanza. In this study, however, parents and children were unfamiliar with the story that they read and only read it once, and thus, we do not know if a more consistent difference might emerge in the strategies parents might use over time when highlighting new words in rhymed versus unrhymed books, and of course, whether those cumulative differences might impact children’s retention of the new words.

One limitation of previous studies of the impact of rhyme on vocabulary learning in shared reading is that they have tested only immediate recall after just a single session, rather than a more commonplace experience of hearing a story read multiple times over days. Reading a book more than just once reflects the importance of two benefits children gain from shared reading – it encourages repetition of unfamiliar vocabulary by the reader and is shown to aid children in retaining these novel words (Horst et al., 2011; McLeod & McDade, 2011; Sénéchal, 1997). Thus, book text structure (i.e. rhyming vs non-rhyming) combined with multiple readings over time, may have an effect on both the way the reader and child interact with the story and on the child’s target vocabulary retention from the story. Therefore, one focus of the current study is to ensure that shared reading takes place in a day-by-day context to more fully examine the impact of book text type on extra-textual commentary and new word highlighting.

The current study aims to investigate differences in parent reading strategies, parent–child dialogue, and children’s word retention when reading rhymed vs unrhymed versions of the same book repeatedly in a natural setting. We sought to answer four questions: (1) Does book type (rhymed or unrhymed) have an effect on word retention in this context? (2) Does book type have an effect on extra-textual reading strategies that support learning? (3) Do extra-textual reading strategies change over time as a book becomes more familiar? and (4) Do extra-textual reading strategies correlate with children’s new word retention from the story they hear?

Method

Participants

In total, 30 children (12 males, 18 females), aged 3 and 4 years (M_age = 43 months, range: 35–55 months), participated in our study with a caregiver. Children were recruited from an on-campus preschool, a volunteer database specific to our lab of local parents interested in participating in child development research, and word of mouth. Participants were all typically developing without any diagnosis of language or learning delays, and both children and caregivers spoke English as their primary language. Children and their caregivers were from racial and ethnically diverse households’ representative of local demographics.¹ Each child was randomly assigned to either a rhymed or unrhymed version of the same story, resulting in 15 participants who heard the rhymed version, and 15 participants who heard the unrhymed version. The mean age of children for each condition was 42 months in the rhymed story condition, and 44 months in the unrhymed story condition. Children were all read to primarily by a residential parent in their household (24 mothers and six fathers). On eight occasions out of 150, both a mother and father participated in the reading session, and on one occasion, an older sibling also participated (e.g. adding comments, or taking a turn reading pages).

Materials

The storybooks used in this study were developed and used in previous studies of the impact of rhyme on new vocabulary learning (Read, 2014; Read et al., 2019). The full text and illustrations of each storybook version can be viewed in the Open Science Framework (OSF) project link: https://osf.io/eqn73/?view_only=80543879c1c84b5c886bcadd27ab2862. Each storybook presents the same eight imaginary monsters, one per page, labeled at the end of a short four-line stanza. All eight monster names were one-syllable nonce words that were easy to pronounce and rhyme with other familiar words with regular English phonotactics (Read, 2014). In the rhyming version of the storybook, each line of the stanza ends with a familiar word that rhymes with the name of the monster always presented in the last line, while in the non-rhyme version, those line-final words were replaced with non-rhyming synonyms to ‘undo’ the rhyme scheme, while keeping the two versions matched for content, length, and difficulty (see Figure 1 for an example page from each version). Two changes to the text of these stories from those used in the two previous studies were made. First, in the current study, half of the monsters were described with female pronouns instead of solely using male pronouns to make the books more appealing to both boys and girls. In addition, due to previous knowledge on the benefits of pausing before reading a new word in a storybook (Read et al., 2014, 2019); ellipses were added before each monster’s name within the text of both versions of the storybook to encourage caregivers to pause slightly before reading the monster’s names. The pages of each story were created as individual slides using PowerPoint© software, but then printed, laminated and spiral bound to create physical books that parents could take home and read with their child.

Figure 1.

Example Text from Both the Rhymed and Unrhymed Version of the ‘smooze’ Page of the Story, and Corresponding Illustration.

For the identification and production tasks in which children participated after five days of reading the books at home, eight identification test slides and eight production slides were created like the storybook pages, first using PowerPoint© software and then printed and laminated for ease of use in actual test sessions. Each identification slide presented a side-by-side pair of monsters from which participants were asked to choose the target after hearing a prompt (e.g. ‘Which one is the Groze?’). Like the tests in Read (2014) and Read et al. (2019), the pairings of monsters were pseudo-randomized: monsters with the same initial consonant cluster were never paired together, the same pair was never repeated, each monster was used as both a foil and a target once, and the target monster was located equally often on either the left or right side of the slide. The eight slides created for the production test pictured monster illustrations each presented alone with a white background, so that the child could be asked to produce a name for each. The order of the monsters in the production task was also randomized. All identification and production slides were presented to each child and were identical across book-type conditions.

Handheld digital audio recording devices purchased from Amazon were given to parents to record during each 5-day reading period. Olympus™ Voice Recorders were chosen for ease of use, quality of voice recording, lack of camera lens (to avoid intrusiveness and ensure confidentiality for parents and children), and portability. One recording device was distributed to one caregiver at a time. Parents consented to our use of their audio-recorded readings with their children and were provided with simple instructions on how to use the recording devices prior to taking the storybooks and recorders home. In addition, parents were free to delete any recordings they did not wish to share with the researchers. Recordings were uploaded, transcribed, and coded in a password-protected digital file after the parents had returned the devices to the lab during the child’s retention testing session.

Procedure

This study was designed as a two condition between-subjects study. Parents were randomly assigned to receive either the rhymed or unrhymed version of the ‘Meet the Friendly Monsters’ storybook that has been used in previous studies of novel word learning from shared reading (e.g. Read, 2014; Read et al., 2019). Parents were instructed to take the book home with a digital audio recorder, and read with their child five times over 5 days. Parents were asked to use the audio recorder to record each time they read the story aloud with their child. After 5 days of reading at home, on the sixth day (i.e. the day following their last shared reading session) children were brought to our on-campus testing space, set up as a child-friendly ‘play room’ and were tested on their retention of the eight monster names from the story. Children’s retention was tested in two ways, first a two-alternative choice picture pointing task to measure children’s ability to identify the illustrated monsters when they were labeled (i.e. identification task), and second with a free recall task in which children were presented with a picture of each monster from the story and given an opportunity to tell the researcher if they could recall its label (i.e. production task).

During testing, children sat in a quiet, child-friendly playroom with their parent present, and once they were ready and assented, they were shown the test pictures by a trained researcher blind to which condition the child had been in. The researchers informed the child, ‘I’m learning about the monsters, and wondered if you could help me learn their names since you read the book already with your mom/dad’. Children were first asked to pick out, e.g. ‘Which one is the Smooze?’ from a pair of illustrations of the monsters from the book. This was repeated until the child had been tested on all eight monsters. Children indicated their choices either verbally or by pointing, and while they were encouraged to make a guess, they were also told that it was okay if they did not remember and could say, ‘I don’t know’. After this identification test, children were then also presented pictures of each of the monsters one-by-one and asked, ‘What was this monster called?’ to further test their memory for the newly learned words. The two tasks allowed for two probes of children’s retention of the monster names, with the easier task preceding the more challenging task as in previous research (e.g. Read et al., 2019; Read & Quirke, 2018) to give children a chance to ‘warm up’ to the testing situation and to remind them of the monster names and images before the more challenging production task to support their optimal performance. This ordering of tasks was consistent across all children and thus posed no confound for interpreting potential differences between conditions in the results.

Coding and analysis of transcripts

Parent–child recordings of the storybooks were transcribed separately by two researchers working independently. Within each transcript, researchers recorded the participant number (i.e. 1 out of 30), recording number (i.e. REC 1 out of five recordings), whether the adult reader was the mother or father, and the start and end times of the actual story reading. Transcribing began at the start of each reading, when the parent first began reading the book (i.e. said the title or began the first line, ‘Here’s a monster . . .’) omitting introductory discussions unrelated to the storybook. Researchers continued transcribing until the recordings had ended to capture any relevant post-book commentary. The respective abbreviations, ‘PAR,’ for ‘parent’ and ‘CHI,’ for ‘child,’ were used at the start of each line of transcript to denote who was currently speaking, and a new line began whenever the speaker changed. Everything that was said was transcribed including the text of the story read aloud. All occurrences of a child’s actual name were replaced with ‘CHI’ for anonymity. In addition, all transcripts included symbols to denote specific non-linguistic occurrences during the readings. For example, ‘<<>>’ was used to indicate overlapping speech, and ‘. . .’ indicated recognizably deliberate pauses in speaking. Other non-speech sounds, such as laughing or silly sounds were indicated with ‘[]’ and included a description within the brackets. Speech overheard in the background was not transcribed, but if the parent–child story reading was interrupted by speech to or from a third party, those instances were indicated in brackets. Two researchers transcribed and coded overlapping subsets of the transcripts. Little to no disagreement occurred between the researchers’ transcriptions and coding, with the amount of agreement averaging 92% across measures. Any disagreements were resolved through discussion with a third researcher.

Measures

Retention measures

The main retention measures in this study included each child’s number correct on the identification task (identification score) and number correct on the production task (production score). Correct identifications were counted as the number out of the eight monsters that each child correctly chose when asked to point to the target monster during the three-alternative forced choice task. Similarly, scores in the production task were derived by counting each time (out of eight) that a child correctly named a target monster when its illustration was presented. These responses were scaled from 0 to 1, with 0 for incorrect or no response, .5 for partially correct naming (e.g. minor mispronunciations, such as ‘schmooze’ instead of ‘smooze’), and 1 for correct naming.

Reading measures

All measures of extra-textual dialogue and reading behaviors were coded from the transcripts for each reading session (first through fifth) for each dyad. Out of the many possible measures, we could take we chose to focus on a single measure of overall extra-textual dialogue (conversational turns), and then measures of extra-textual behaviors by the parent and child that could serve to specifically highlight the new vocabulary (monster names) within the story. The main reading measures were total occurrences per reading and then averages across the five readings of the following six core measures: (1) conversational turns between readers and children, (2) readers’ intentional pauses, (3) readers’ comments directly referencing the monsters, (4) children’s monster name guesses before the names were read aloud, (5) children’s comments directly referencing the monsters, and (6) children’s monster name repetitions after the names were read aloud.

Conversational turns were counted as a measure of overall amount of extra-textual dialogue that could encompass contributions from both the parent and the child (Gilkerson et al., 2017). They were defined as the total number of dialogue switches between reader and child. For example, in the following excerpt, the total number of conversational turns is three, starting with the first switch from parent to child.

PAR:

This dreamy monster’s called a . . . Smai.

CHI:

What’s a smai?

PAR:

I don’t know.

CHI:

Well, whatever it is, it’s so funny.

Intentional pauses were counted as the total number of times a parent deliberately paused before a word. Coders were trained to listen for pauses that exceeded 1–2 seconds, and that seemed intentional because of a ‘drawing out’ of the word that preceded the pause or other indications that the reader was encouraging the child to respond. Intentional pauses were easily recognizable in context, especially because they often occurred in penultimate position within a line of text, such as just before a rhyming word or monster name, or after asking a question with enough time for the child to ‘fill in’ a response or answer (i.e. PAR: Here’s a monster who likes to . . . do you remember? . . . cook.).

Readers’ monster comments consisted of counts of extra-textual utterances by the parent reader that referenced the monsters’ names, physical attributes, or other defining characteristics. This included parent repetitions of lines and names from the story, as well as story comprehension questions and side comments and questions that referred to the monster names or images. Some monster comments were simple reiterations of the information from the story as in this example:

CHI:

This funny monster’s called a Smooze?

PAR:

Yeah. Hello Smooze.

CHI:

Hello, I love you so much!

PAR:

Smooze.

Or in this example:

PAR:

To help him find recipes in his book, this clever monster’s called a <<a>>

CHI:

a [drawn out]

PAR:

Flook. Yeah, the Flook is a cook.

In addition, dyads sometimes used the monster comments as ‘jumping off points’ for other conversation, such as in the following exchanges, in which only the first comment would be counted as monster related:

PAR:

Look at all that exhaust coming out of the Flar’s car. That’s not good!

CHI:

Why?

PAR:

He needs better emissions control.

CHI:

Why?

PAR:

Because it’s making smoke. So everywhere he goes, he’d be making a whole bunch of dirty smoke.

PAR:

Does Flook have a recipe book like you do?

CHI:

Yeah.

PAR:

Did we bake some cupcakes today?

CHI:

Yes.

PAR:

Were they yummy?

Children’s monster name guesses were defined as both the total number of guesses (whether correct or incorrect) made by the child about the monster names before hearing the monster’s name actually read aloud. More broadly, children’s monster comments consisted of any comments about the monsters’ names, physical attributes, or other defining characteristics, similar to readers’ monster comments. For example, in the following conversation between a parent and child from the non-rhyming group, the child comments directly on the sound of the monster’s name:

PAR

: . . . Smooze.

CHI:

It sounds like snooze.

PAR:

It does. You think he’s sleepy?

One major difference between children’s monster comments and readers’ monster comments, however, was that readers’ comments also included repetitions of lines and names from the story, whereas child comments did not because we measured children’s monster name repetitions separately. These were defined as the total number of times a child repeated a monster name directly after the parent had read aloud or mentioned the monster’s name.

In sum, each of these six reading measures was taken to capture extra-textual aspects of the read alouds that could potentially highlight and help teach the novel vocabulary (monster names), and each of these measures had the potential to be influenced by whether the story itself was rhymed or unrhymed.

Results

Anonymized data collected and used for the following analyses can be found at the OSF project link:https://osf.io/eqn73/?view_only=80543879c1c84b5c886bcadd27ab2862. All participating dyads completed all five readings. Readings lasted an average of almost 4 minutes (M = 03:53, SD = 02:10), and in all cases, there were additional comments and/or verbal behaviors by the readers beyond simply reading the text aloud verbatim, providing us with data for each reading for each dyad.

Book-type effects on retention

Across the sample of children in this study, there was evidence that participants remembered many of the monster names that they had been exposed to in the books they heard read aloud. Children’s identification scores (M = 6.97, SD = 1.40) were significantly greater than chance (4.00), t(29) = 11.60, p < .001, d = 2.12, and children’s production scores (M = 3.00, SD = 2.12) were anecdotally higher than in other comparison studies testing children’s recall of these same monster names (Read, 2014; Read et al., 2019), and were also significantly greater than 0, t(29) = 7.75, p < .001, d = 1.41.

To test the overall effect of book type (rhymed or non-rhyme) on children’s retention of the monster names after 5 days of reading the books at home with a caregiver, we first compared children’s identification and production scores between conditions (see Table 1) by conducting independent samples t-tests. These analyses demonstrated that there was no significant effect of book type on children’s ability to identify the monsters correctly in the picture-pointing test, M_rhyme = 7.00, SD = 1.46, M_non-rhyme = 6.93, SD = 1.39, t(28) = –1.28, p = .899, d = –.05, and no effect of book type on children’s ability to produce the monster names correctly, M_rhyme = 2.57, SD = 2.11, M_non-rhyme = 3.43, SD = 2.11, t(28) = 1.12, p = .271, d = .41. Thus, after five repetitions of reading the storybooks at home, there were no discernible differences between children’s retention of the monsters’ labels based on whether they were presented in rhymed format or not.

Table 1.

Monster name retention scores from both tasks by condition.

	Rhyme		Non-rhyme
	M (SD)	Range	M (SD)	Range
Identification scores	7.00 (1.46)	4–8	6.93 (1.39)	4–8
Production scores	2.57 (2.11)	0–8	3.43 (2.11)	0–7

The maximum score on both tests was 8.

However, it is of note that there may have been ceiling effects masking condition differences in children’s identification scores. In many cases in both conditions, children’s retention of the monster names as tested by the simple identification task was at ceiling, with 9 out of 15 children in the rhymed storybook condition and 8 out of 15 children in the unrhymed storybook condition identifying all eight monsters correctly at test. While in previous research this simple identification task has been sensitive enough to detect differences in children’s retention of new words from a one or two read alouds of a story, while the production task has resulted in scores suffering from a floor effect (Read, 2014; Read et al., 2019), in these data, it appears that the production scores may be the more useful of the two retention measures.

In addition, with the current sample size, we did not have sufficient power to detect effects less than a Cohen’s d of 1.25. Previous two condition studies of novel word retention from rhymed versus unrhymed stories have found significantly greater retention in rhyming conditions with similar or smaller sample sizes, but with effect sizes ranging from only d = .66 to d = .79 (Read, 2014 [expt 2]; Read et al., 2014 [expt 2]; Read & Quirke, 2018). Thus, while there is not sufficient evidence of a significant difference in monster name retention on either the identification or production measures between the two book-type conditions here, there is also not necessarily support for the null hypothesis either (Dienes, 2014). Thus, these data alone were insufficient to discriminate whether there was an effect of book language type after five read alouds on what new monster names children remembered.

Book-type effects on reading behaviors

To test the effects of differences based on sharing a rhymed versus unrhymed book, for each reading measure, we used independent samples t-tests to compare participant dyads in the rhyme condition to dyads in the unrhymed condition by their mean average responses across the 5 days (see Table 2). As described in Table 2, there were no statistically significant differences in mean average use of conversational turns, intentional pauses, reader comments about the monster, child guesses, child comments about the monster, or child monster name repetitions between dyads in the rhyme versus non-rhyme book-type condition. Similar to the measures of retention described above, for none of these reading measures was the data sensitive enough to find evidence either for or against the null hypothesis that parents and children were engaging in extra-textual conversation and vocabulary highlighting strategies equally as often regardless of book type.

Table 2.

Mean average number of behaviors across five readings for each reading measure by condition.

	Rhyme	Non-rhyme	p value	Effect size (d)
	M (SD)	M (SD)	p value	Effect size (d)
Conversation turns	42.6 (47.4)	55.8 (18.3)	.321	.369
Intentional pauses	7.97 (3.4)	7.48 (5.0)	.754	–.116
Reader’s monster comments	10.1 (6.3)	16.6 (16.1)	.152	.537
Child’s guesses	1.77 (2.20)	1.69 (1.80)	.921	–.037
Child’s monster comments	5.87 (2.79)	9.20 (8.85)	.175	.508
Child repetitions	5.23 (2.98)	6.51 (4.35)	.358	.342

Changes in reading over time

Table 3 provides the descriptive statistics for all participants’ reading behavior measures for each of their five reading days. To examine whether there was significant change over time, and whether change over time differed between the two book-type groups, repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with reading day as a within-subjects factor and condition as a between-subjects factor were conducted for each dependent measure.

Table 3.

Mean number of behaviors on each reading day across all children.

	Reading day					Main effect
	Reading day					p value	partial η²
	1	2	3	4	5
	M (SD)	M (SD)	M (SD)	M (SD)	M (SD)
Conversation turns	42.3 (40.6)	53.4 (43.2)	45.0 (46.3)	51.3 (39.0)	53.9 (45.3)	.338	.039
Reader
Intentional pauses	6.95 (4.32)	7.95 (5.21)	7.53 (5.44)	7.97 (6.00)	8.23 (5.44)	.698	.019
Monster comments	13.9 (15.1)	15.2 (14.6)	11.6 (14.6)	12.9 (12.1)	13.2 (14.7)	.506	.029
Child
Guesses	.67 (1.40)	1.68 (2.64)	1.33 (2.22)	1.80 (2.46)	3.17 (3.43)	<.001	.232
Monster comments	7.63 (7.04)	8.70 (7.72)	6.80 (11.3)	7.20 (7.01)	7.33 (8.18)	.764	.016
Monster repetitions	5.55 (5.02)	6.47 (3.59)	6.38 (5.68)	5.72 (4.63)	5.23 (4.11)	.496	.011

For conversational turns, readers’ intentional pauses, readers’ comments directly about the monsters, children’s comments directly about the monsters, and children’s repetitions of the monster names, we found no significant main effect of reading day (see Table 3 for p values and effect size measures for these main effects tests). We also found for all five of these measures, no main effects of condition (ps all > .150, η_p² all < .075) and no interactions between reading day and condition, (ps all > .600, partial η² all < .007). As a result, the number of times readers and their children took turns speaking appears to have remained relatively constant during each of the 5 days regardless of whether they were reading the rhyming or non-rhyming storybook.

For one measure, children’s monster name guesses, there was a significant main effect of reading day, F(4, 112) = 8.47, p < .001, partial η² = .232. Bonferroni-corrected pairwise tests indicated that children did more guessing on their last day of reading (Day 5) compared to Day 1 (p = .005, d = .72), Day 3 (p = .005, d = .72), and Day 4 (p = .020, d = .60). However, there was not a significant main effect of condition on children’s monster name guesses, F(1, 28) = .01, p = .921, partial η² = .000, nor was there an interaction between reading day and condition, F(4, 112) = 1.70, p = .156, partial η² = .057.

In sum, it appears that by most measures there was greater variability in extra-textual reading behaviors between individual dyads than within dyads across time. One notable exception was an increase in how often children made verbal guesses of the monster names ahead of hearing them read aloud from the first to the final reading. Any changes that did occur, however, from 1 day to the next of reading were not measurably affected by whether the book was rhyming or not.

Reading behaviors and retention

To explore the possible relationships between specific extra-textual shared reading behaviors on the part of both the adult readers and the child, and the children’s ultimate recognition and retention of the new monster names, we first examined a series of bivariate correlations among all of the reading measures derived from each dyad’s read alouds across five readings and each child’s score on both their identification and production tests of monster name retention. The full correlation matrix is presented in Table 4.

Table 4.

Bivariate correlations among reading measures and retention measures.

Measure	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Retention measures
1. Identification	__
2. Production	.59***	__
Reading measures
3. Conversational turns	–.07	–.05	__
4. Intentional pauses	–.02	.07	.92***	__
5. Readers’ monster comments	–.09	–.10	.61***	.49**	__
6. Children’s guesses	.23	.54**	.32	.34	.14	__
7. Children’s monster comments	–.22	–.27	.84***	.30	.88***	.03	__
8. Children’s repetitions	–.04	–.07	.68***	.52**	.53**	.10	.46*

p < .05, two-tailed; **p < .01, two-tailed; ***p < .001.

As can be seen from Table 4, children’s scores on both retention tests were strongly positively correlated with each other, r = .59, p < .001.

The measures of different types of extra-textual reading behaviors were also largely correlated with one another. For example, total conversational turns was positively correlated with parents’ comments specifically about the monster, r = .92, p < .001, their use of pauses, r = .61, p < .001, and children’s comments specifically about the monsters, r = .84, p < .001. The amount of guesses children made about upcoming monster names only marginally correlated with the number of dramatic pauses that parents’ offered to allow/encourage those guesses, r = .34, p = .063, and with total number of conversational turns, r = .32, p = .089, though these relationships were still in the expected positive direction. In general, these intercorrelations among reading measures suggest dyads who were engaged in more dialogue in general as they read the stories (measured via conversational turns), were also engaged in more of the specific new vocabulary highlighting measures of interest.

Of most interest were any possible correlations between extra-textual reading behaviors and retention measures. We found that children’s identification scores did not correlate with any prior read-aloud behaviors, possibly because of ceiling effect in these scores. Children’s production scores were, however, most notably related to children’s own verbalized monster name guesses during the read alouds, r = .54, p = .002, though not to children’s own general comments about the monsters r = –.27, p = .146, nor even their repetitions of the monster names, r = –.07, p = .722. Thus, while there was ample parent–child dialogue across the readings, more conversation in general was not always more helpful for learning the monster names, but more active monster name predictions on the part of the children may have been.

Finally, while children did not differ between book types in how often they made guesses of the monsters’ names before they heard them during the readings (Table 2), it was still of interest whether the relationship between guessing and later success in recalling and producing the names at test might be differentially strong depending on whether children were using rhyme or not to support those guesses. To investigate this, we split the sample by condition and then reanalyzed the bivariate correlations of all reading and retention measures. We found that for children who heard the rhymed story version, the correlation between making monster name guesses and later production scores was stronger, r(13) = .65, p = .009 than for children who heard unrhymed versions, r(13) = .45, p = .095. Thus, while verbalizing guesses (correct or incorrect) predicted higher levels of later recall across the whole sample, the relationship between guessing ahead during reading and being able to correctly produce the monster names at test was even more pronounced for children who had made those guesses in the context of rhymed stories.

Discussion

The current study sought to answer the following questions: whether book type influences word retention, whether book type influences extra-textual reading behaviors, whether reading behaviors change over time with the same book, and whether reading behaviors, particularly those that highlight new words, correlate with later retention of those words in preschool-aged children. Parent–child dyads read and recorded either a rhymed or unrhymed version of a monster storybook over a 5-day period, and then children were tested on their ability to subsequently identify all eight monsters by both pointing them out, and also producing all eight monster names when presented with their pictures. Interpretation of differences based on book type in reading behaviors and children’s retention were constrained in this study because of limited power as well as unanticipated ceiling effects. Overall, the findings from tests of children’s monster name retention and recall, and measures of six key extra-textual reading behaviors showed no significant effects based on whether children had heard rhymed versus unrhymed versions of the story over 5 days. In most cases, the differences among individual dyads were greater than between groups. Dyads were consistent in their use of extra-textual commentary and novel word-highlighting strategies across days. Finally, correlational measures of the relationships between dyads’ reading behaviors and children’s subsequent monster name retention showed that in this study the only extra-textual behavior that predicted later recall was the amount that children made verbal guesses of the monster names as the stories were read, highlighting the unique importance of this particular extra-textual reading behavior.

The lack of significant differences found in children’s identification and production of monster names between the rhyming and non-rhyming conditions contrasts with previous research. Prior studies have demonstrated a boost for new vocabulary retention when that new vocabulary is placed at the end of rhymed stanzas in children’s books (e.g. Read, 2014; Read & Quirke, 2018). There are two important differences between the current study and the previous research that may, in part, explain the contradictory findings: (1) in this study, parents (not researchers) were the story readers at home in their more natural settings, and (2) parents read the stories multiple times over the course of a week, allowing spaced repetition of the monster names. The finding in the current study that rhyming new vocabulary within storybooks does not enhance word learning implies that there may be other non-textual influences on how children learn and retain novel vocabulary from the stories. In particular, parents’ individual extra-textual reading strategies and the importance of repetition over time. The latter is almost surely a factor that contributed to improved performance relative to other studies that have found a ‘floor effect’ in the production task (e.g. Justice, 2002; Read, 2014; Read et al., 2019), and an apparent ceiling effect in the monster identification task, as research has clearly established that preschoolers’ retention of new vocabulary from stories is improved with story repetition (e.g. Horst, 2013). The finding that 70% of children could correctly identify at least seven of the eight monsters after a few days of reading the stories likely masked any more subtle differences in retention that rhyme might have impacted. To correct for these limitations, future research could include retention testing after every instance of reading (at the risk of repeated testing adding to learning) rather than waiting until the conclusion of, for example, a 5-day reading period, such as conducted in the current study. With repeated testing, researchers could explore whether there is an initial rhyme advantage or whether the trajectory for learning from rhymed versus unrhymed stories might differ. In addition, more challenging retention tests (i.e. a four-alternative multiple choice rather than a two-alternative choice), or longer delays between reading and testing could increase the sensitivity of measures of even simple recognition memory for new vocabulary.

The second difference between this study and previous work that has shown a rhyme advantage when children are learning new words from shared reading is the more natural reading setting and parents’ relative freedom to engage in whatever extra-textual commentary and word-highlighting strategies that they were comfortable with. Given more license, parent readers and their children engaged in diverse extra-textual reading behaviors from dyad to dyad. In this study, we did not find statistically significant differences in the use of specific extra-textual new vocabulary highlighting behaviors between book types, likely because of the large variation between dyads. Overall, increases in the use of these strategies at home in this study relative to what has been observed in single, in-lab read alouds in other studies may also have masked more subtle differences between rhymed and unrhymed books. For example, in the Read et al. (2014) study, parents made on average of 11.3 and 6.1 extra-textual comments during a read aloud of a rhymed or unrhymed version, respectively, of an animal book, while in this study, conversational turns (which sometimes include more than a single extra-textual comment) averaged 42.6 and 55.8 for rhymed and unrhymed versions, respectively, of the monster story read at home in a more natural environment. Slightly higher (though not significant) amounts of extra-textual conversational turns, and comments directly about the monster from parents and children in the unrhymed versions of the story may have even served as a compensatory mechanism mediating the direct effects of rhyme on target vocabulary learning for the children. To explore this further, future research will need to increase the power of analyses to capture more subtle differences and to control for multiple sources of variation, either by including greater numbers of participants or by considering a within-subjects design.

This high level of extra-textual interaction overall in the current sample along with our choice of measures may also explain the surprising failure to find significant changes in reading behaviors over time. Other researchers have observed effects of familiarity through repeated reading on the ways that parents and children comment on stories (e.g. Fletcher & Finch, 2015), particularly changes that demonstrate a shift from initially introducing information with simple statements toward more and higher demand questions that probe children’s knowledge (Blewitt et al., 2009; McArthur et al., 2005). Some of the measures we centered in this study (total numbers of conversational turns, parent or child comments) captured the amount of commentary but not the role or purpose of those comments or their demand level, and thus, we may have missed more nuanced changes across reading sessions. Further research can and should probe more deeply how book language and repeated reading may impact what types of exchanges readers and children have while reading, both in the spontaneous conversations that arise during at-home reading and in more intentionally instructive settings like early childhood education center (ECEC) classroom read alouds where many varied extra-textual reading strategies can be and have been observed (e.g. Korat et al., 2018; Weadman et al., 2021).

One of the extra-textual behaviors among the many that we investigated that warrants a closer examination in this and future research is children’s anticipatory guesses of upcoming words. In both conditions of this study, children attempted to guess the novel monster names before they were read or said aloud during shared reading. Surprisingly, parents did not dramatically pause to encourage guesses with any more frequency when reading either version of the story, and children did not have a tendency to make more guesses of upcoming monster names in either version of the story despite previous research that would suggest that rhymed stories may encourage more dramatic pausing by a reader and subsequent guessing of rhyme completions by a child listener (Read et al., 2014, 2019); However, the positive correlation between children’s predictive guesses and their later success on producing the monster names at test, especially in the rhyme condition indicates that there is something particularly helpful in this behavior for learning.

Guesses may have led to better memory, even deeper learning of the monster names because of the extra cognitive effort and attention that they indicated. Guessing the monster names while reading appears to be more effective than simply practicing saying their names through repetitions or even commenting on them, given the lack of correlation between repetition and recall or the amount of monster comments and recall. Guessing at the monster names before they are heard is a specific type of lexical prediction, a high cognitive demand activity, that children this age are capable of (Read & Regan, 2018; Read et al., 2022) and respond to positively (Read et al., 2019). The extra engagement through cognitive effort and playfulness that guessing induces may be an important recipe for memory and learning (e.g. Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). In the examples that follow, we can see how this guessing typically occurred over repetitions of the story. On the first day, the child noticed the monster name and inquired about it:

PAR:

This monster can go very far when he rides in his supercar. He’s faster than a shooting star. This dreamy monster’s called a Flar!

CHI:

[to PAR] Why?

PAR:

I don’t know. Probably for the rhyme. There’s some questions about this book’s prosody, but we’ll leave that for later.

Then, with this same dyad on Day 2, the child correctly guessed the monster name:

PAR:

[to CHI] I feel like you’re picking up on rhyming. That’s kinda good. Maybe you’ll be a poet like daddy. This monster can go very far when he rides in his supercar. He’s faster than a shooting star. This speedy monster’s called a . . .

CHI:

Flar!

PAR:

Yes, Flar!

Given this type of exchange, perhaps, it is no surprise that this child went on to correctly remember and produce most of the monster names at test a few days later. Also in this case, the rhyme scheme was clearly made plain for this child and possibly aided in her correct guessing on Day 2 of reading. Although there were no differences in amount of guessing that occurred between children who were hearing rhymed versus unrhymed versions of the story, we did note that in the rhymed story group children were generally more accurate (71%) when they guessed a monster name during reading than children in the unrhymed story condition (53%), likely because the rhyme helps children predict upcoming words (Read et al., 2022). However, differences in accuracy of children’s guesses may not actually matter for later retention. The following example occurring in the dyad’s second book-reading session illustrates how guessing, even when guesses are incorrect, might still be useful for learning.

CHI:

This one’s called Glow.

PAR:

You’re close. This smart monster always knows when she’s near a skunk or near a rose. Because she has a giant nose [emphasized], this sniffing monster’s called a Groze.

Although the above guess was incorrect, the child’s attempt to remember the monster’s name ahead of time clearly oriented his and his parent’s attention to the upcoming correction, even encouraging the parent to emphasize the rhyming word nose to highlight pronunciation. This example, when seen through the lens of error-based learning (e.g. Rabagliati et al., 2016) may have actually made the monster name more memorable than if the child had simply guessed it correctly to begin with.

This study’s findings add to research on the positive benefits associated with shared reading for preschool-aged children and the relevance and diversity of extra-textual dialogue around a book reading. However, the extent to which the current study is generalizable is still limited. This sample consisted primarily of well-resourced children in upper-/middle-class households with college educated parent readers, whereas we know that a larger more diverse sample yields even more variability in how parents and children read together (Hindman et al., 2014). The dyads in the current study were likely to include both highly invested and practiced readers sharing stories with already strong language learners. Parents in this sample all reported that shared reading was part of their regular routine with their children and that the children heard stories read aloud at least several times a week if not multiple times a day. In addition, we can see from some of the specific comments made by readers in the transcripts that parents, who were aware that their children would be tested on ‘what they remembered from the stories’, were often deliberately pedagogical about presenting the monster names and even adding extra-textual commentary to help children remember them. These particular tendencies of our sample likely contributed to the ceiling effects in children’s monster name retention that were described above, but are not likely to be representative of a wider and more typical sample of parent–child read alouds. Future work should expand on our questions about the specific effects of rhyme on both extra-textual reading behaviors and children’s novel word retention with more diverse samples of children of different socio-economic statuses, different language backgrounds, and potentially with inclusion of children with language development differences. Broadening the research in these ways would allow for greater generalizability of the findings, which, in turn, could promote stronger recommendations for good practice in choosing books and employing extra-textual reading strategies in support of children’s vocabulary development.

This small, but rich study adds to our understanding of the benefits of reading with, rather than just reading to young children. In examining both book text type and reading behaviors within the same study, we were able to incorporate two sources of variation from the triangular interaction of storybook reading in one study. Even as the findings here were limited, they suggest that differences between dyads in the way that a book is read and talked about may be at least as, if not more, important than differences in the text within the book itself for supporting vocabulary learning from shared reading.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the partnership of Kids on Campus Child Development Center and the Santa Clara University Child Development Research Group volunteer pool for recruitment support in addition to the families who volunteered their time. They would also like to acknowledge the help and feedback received from research colleagues in the Read Lab.

Author contribution(s)

Kirsten Read: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing.

Alena Rogojina: Data curation; Formal analysis; Methodology; Writing – review & editing.

Olivia Hauer Richard: Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was financially supported with an internal grant from the Santa Clara University Provost’s Office to Kirsten Read.

ORCID iDs

Kirsten Read

Alena Rogojina

Notes

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