Seeing the big picture: How early-learned nouns and their referents co-occur in children’s picture books

Shared picture book reading is well established as an activity with potential to boost vocabulary acquisition. One way that cognitive and developmental scientists have sought to better understand the potential mechanisms by which reading picture books supports acquisition is through detailed examinations of the content of these books. Such analyses have revealed different ways in which the linguistic elements of children's picture books are both rich and distinct from those observed in child-directed speech, raising the possibility that the linguistic environment promoted by shared book reading may be key to its power. The current study provides data to suggest that the <i>visual</i> elements of children's picture books may also deserve some consideration. In an analysis of 128 picture books commonly read to children in North America, we found that the visual depictions of early-learned nouns are in line with research on what facilitates early word learning in three specific ways: (1) nouns and their referents co-occur at high rates, (2) noun-referent co-occurrence patterns are tightly aligned temporally, and (3) the referents of early-learned nouns were visually frequent. Further analyses reveal how some of these properties were more prominent for the earliest learned nouns and in books targeting the youngest of audiences. The implications of these findings for how children learn from picture books and for the learning environment that is cultivated by reading them are discussed.