The greater diversity of book input arises mainly because different books sample the language more broadly than different conversations do¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2015 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? The primary reason book reading yields greater input diversity is that different books sample the words of the language more broadly than different conversations do. → Montag Jessica L. 2015

Evidence¶

Montag Jessica L. 2015¶

Montag Jessica L., Jones Michael N., Smith Linda B. (2015). The words children hear: Picture books and the statistics for language learning. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615594361

q2 · i? · associational · r2

Authors' interpretation of the Figure 1b analyses of individual books and conversations. The article reasons that conversations are limited to here-and-now content while each book may open new domains and new words. This is an interpretive claim, not a tested result.

"the primary reason that book-reading to infants results in a greater diversity of words in the input appears to be because different books sample the words in the language more broadly than do different do different conversations."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Individual picture books typically contain more unique words at a given sample size than individual conversations — related
• The text of children's picture books contains more unique word types than a length-matched sample of child-directed speech — related
• At matched token sizes, samples of picture-book text almost never contain fewer unique word types than samples of child-directed speech — a narrower finding that bears on this claim