The Perception Society lecture by Dr Jessica Horst (WORD Lab, University of Sussex) was held on 25 January. Review by Cosima (Year 13):
Reading stories to children often turns into a favourite activity, with tales of princesses and dragons, witches and wizards, or even just a very hungry caterpillar stimulating their imagination and expanding their horizons. Storybooks do indeed play an incredible part in a child's development. Yet it is not just the ability for stories to provoke curiosity that makes them so important, but also their ability to teach.
In this week's Perception lecture, Dr Jessica Horst, a faculty member at the University of Sussex and researcher at the WORD Lab, discussed the importance of storybooks for babies and children, and characteristics that make learning words from them more effective.
Dr Horst first showed the audience the difficulty in teaching young babies to learn names for object categories using both real objects and stories. As an example, Dr Horst used her son James and his experience learning the word 'tiger'. 'Tiger' could mean anything to James, so although we know that 'tiger' refers to a wild animal with black and orange stripes, we have learnt this through experience. James first encountered this word in the storybook, ’The Tiger Who Came to Tea', but it was through probabilistic associative learning, determining the most probable and optimal solution given present constraints, that James learnt 'tiger'.
However, learning what something ‘is not’, is just as important.
According to Dr Horst, children need to determine referent via syntactic bootstrapping (language structure) and other supports, using a process of elimination and mutual exclusivity. Children use names of words already familiar to build an understanding of other things, which raises the question: can a child apply a word to a new example of the same thing?
By asking children to recall a previously fast mapped name or object link after a delay, often in a new context, Dr Horst explored children's ability to learn new words. Of course, research considerations need to be made when testing children, especially between ages of 2 to 4, as young children are bias to answer 'yes'. It is also important to remember that children can only learn up to 3 to 4 words a day, so tasks should not be made too easy or too hard.
Dr Horst told us about her two streams of research with different methods, learning names of objects (toys) and stories written in the lab. Each physical object or fictional object was given a made up name sounding similar to an English word, to make each object novel, as children love novelty. Every word we use now was in fact once a novelty. 'Prequel' became a word in 1958, 'ginormous' became a word in 2007, and 'selfie' became a word just a few years ago in 2013.
In this study, Dr Horst presented three objects to a child, comprising of one novel target and two known competitors. The child would be asked to name the unknown object, ‘Can you get the pabe’, but also the known object, “Can you get the cow?’, to make sure they were listening. To test if the child remembered the new word, they were then asked to pick up the new object from three unknown objects. The same exercise was carried out with stories based around these objects.
So, in the context of word learning, is less more, using fewer words? Dr Horst conducted a study where one group of 2 year old children were asked to put four differently named objects into a bucket through demonstrations of ‘see the blicket', whereas the other group was told ‘see this one', instead of the name. Those children given the word blicket performed significantly better, being 15 times more likely to choose the correct object.
This experiment was replicated with an iCub, a humanoid toddler robot that learns via unsupervised associate learning, to test if it could perform as the children did. The iCub produced the same pattern of results, proving that learning fewer words at a time is more effective.
iCub Robot
However, is less more, using fewer stories? Children have a habit of always asking to hear the same story repeatedly, night after night. One of Dr Horst's studies looked at a group of children who read three different stories each day for three days. Another group read three similar stories each night. The group with the similar stories recalled the words significantly better than the children with the different stories. Why does repetition help? Perception members were told that through repeated readings, children know what to expect in the story and can therefore focus on the finer details and new words.
Story time commonly takes place at bedtime, which is why Dr Horst questioned if sleep consolidation can facilitate learning beyond books. Through yet another study, it was found that children who take a nap after reading are able to recall words at a much higher accuracy than those who did not. This showed that sleep benefits are greatest shortly after leaning. Even short naps of 6 minutes can improve learning.
Through these studies, it was found that generally, less is more. Children learn more words with fewer new words, fewer new objects, fewer repeated stories, fewer illustrations per page, fewer combinations of objects, and fewer colours at a time.
Dr Horst's research involves a wide variety of fascinating aspects of development and learning in children, making this a truly captivating lecture.
Dr Jessica Horst (WORD Lab, University of Sussex)
