Summary: Researchers have implicated an enzyme that appears to make both Tau and alpha synculein more toxic in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Inhibiting this enzyme has already proved helpful in treating animal models of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers report they are moving on to testing drugs that inhibit AEP in animal models of Parkinson’s disease.
Source: University of Sussex.
Less is more when it comes to helping children learn new vocabulary from picture books, according to a new study.
While publishers look to produce ever more colourful and exciting texts to entice buyers, University of Sussex psychologists have shown that having more than one illustration per page results in poorer word learning among pre-schoolers.
The findings, published in Infant and Child Development, present a simple solution to parents and nursery teachers for some of the challenges of pre-school education and could help in the development of learning materials for young children.
Doctoral researcher and co-author Zoe Flack said: “Luckily, children like hearing stories, and adults like reading them to children. But children who are too young to read themselves don’t know where to look because they are not following the text. This has a dramatic impact on how well they learn new words from stories.”
The researchers read storybooks to three-year-olds with one illustration at a time (the right-hand page was illustrated, the left-hand page was blank) or with two illustrations at a time (both pages had illustrations), with illustrations introducing the child to new objects that were named on the page.
They found that children who were read stories with only one illustration at a time learned twice as many words as children who were read stories with two or more illustrations.
In a follow-up experiment, researchers added a simple hand swipe gesture to guide the children to look at the correct illustration before the page was read to them. They found this gesture was effective in helping children to learn words when they saw two illustrations across the page.
Zoe, who has written a blog post about the research, said: “This suggests that simply guiding children’s attention to the correct page helps them focus on the right illustrations, and this in turn might help them concentrate on the new words.
“Our findings fit well with Cognitive Load Theory, which suggests that learning rates are affected by how complicated a task is. In this case, by giving children less information at once, or guiding them to the correct information, we can help children learn more words.”
Co-author Dr Jessica Horst said: “Other studies have shown that adding ‘bells and whistles’ to storybooks like flaps to lift and anthropomorphic animals decreases learning. But this is the first study to examine how decreasing the number of illustrations increases children’s word learning from storybooks.”
She added: “This study also has important implications for the e-Book industry. Studies on the usefulness of teaching vocabulary from e-Books are mixed, but our study suggests one explanation is that many studies with e-Books are presenting only one illustration at a time.”
The study is one of many being carried out at Sussex in The WORD Lab, a research group that focuses on how children learn and acquire language. Previous research has shown children learn more words from hearing the same stories repeated and from hearing stories at nap time.
The authors will be discussing this study and related findings at a British Science Festival event on Saturday 9 September 2017 at Brighton’s Jubilee Library.
Source: Jacqui Bealing – University of Sussex
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the University of Sussex news release.
Original Research: Abstract for “Two sides to every story: Children learn words better from one storybook page at a time” by Zoe M. Flack, and Jessica S. Horst in Infant and Child Development. Published online June 30 2017 doi:10.1002/icd.2047
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]University of Sussex “Picture Overload Hinders Child’s Ability to Learn New Words in Storybooks.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 3 July 2017.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/picturebook-learning-7021/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]University of Sussex (2017, July 3). Picture Overload Hinders Child’s Ability to Learn New Words in Storybooks. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved July 3, 2017 from https://neurosciencenews.com/picturebook-learning-7021/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]University of Sussex “Picture Overload Hinders Child’s Ability to Learn New Words in Storybooks.” https://neurosciencenews.com/picturebook-learning-7021/ (accessed July 3, 2017).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Abstract
Two sides to every story: Children learn words better from one storybook page at a time
Two experiments tested how the number of illustrations in storybooks influences 3.5-year-old children’s word learning from shared reading. In Experiment 1, children encountered stories with two regular-sized A4 illustrations, one regular-sized A4 illustration, or one large-sized A3 illustration (in the control group) per spread. Children learned significantly fewer words when they had to find the referent within two illustrations presented at the same time. In Experiment 2, a gesture was added to guide children’s attention to the correct page in the 2-illustration condition. Children who saw two illustrations with a guiding gesture learned words as well as children who had seen only one illustration per spread. Results are discussed in terms of the cognitive load of word learning from storybooks.
“Two sides to every story: Children learn words better from one storybook page at a time” by Zoe M. Flack, and Jessica S. Horst in Infant and Child Development. Published online June 30 2017 doi:10.1002/icd.2047
