Picture-book reading by mothers and young children and its impact upon language development

Journal of Pragmatics North-Holland

547

9 (1985) 547-566

PICTURE-BOOK READING BY MOTHERS AND YOUNG AND ITS IMPACT UPON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Ernst L. MOERK

CHILDREN

*

The impact of parental picture-book reading with young children upon language development and. the resulting language skills are discussed. Three major aspects are differentiated: the support derived from the pictures themselves; the establishment of joint attention between mother and child, and the features of the text. A symbolization gradient is described, leading from toys over pictures to words as arbitrary representations of the referents. The prototypical and simplified nature of the pictures is emphasized and the rhythmic, rhyming, and repetitive features of the text, supporting pattern abstraction and memory storage, are discussed. After the logical analysis of the principles involved, processes of actual mother-child conversation about picture books that have been described in the literature are summarized.

1. Introduction In our Western, middle-class culture, picture books and the accompanying nursery stories surround children from their first year of life on. Developmental psycholinguists, being predominantly young mothers and fathers, will entertain and instruct their own children with the same or similar picture books and nursery rhymes. Nevertheless, only few and widely dispersed reports can be found in the research literature as to the possible functions of these so common environmental enrichments, and of their effects upon language acquisition by children. The present review is intended to provide a preliminary remedy to this situation. The emphasis lies upon the word preliminary since, with this relatively new endeavor, any attempt to provide a definitive report would be highly premature. The goals of the study are accordingly restricted to the following: (a) Several suggestions as to the principles involved in the provision and use of picture books plus nursery rhymes will be made. (b) The literature reporting on the processes encountered when mothers and children employ these materials will be surveyed, and some general phenomena will be abstracted. * I want to thank Orna Molayem for her help in the literature search. Author’s address: E.L. Moerk, Dept. of Psychology, California California 93740, USA.

0378-2166/85/$3.30

0 1985, Elsevier Science Publishers

State

B.V. (North-Holland)

University,

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The bases of the studies referred to, and therewith the scope of their evidence, vary widely. Only a few reports have specifically focused, at least in the form of a sub-topic of a larger study, upon picture books and nursery rhymes. Many of the sources encountered touched upon the topics only with a few passing remarks, and these remarks seem to be often based more upon common-sense impressions than upon systematically collected data. The information being so sparse, all relevant references were included. The present review could therefore function as a reference source and survey over ideas. Hopefully, it will thereby be a source for hypotheses and future systematic studies.

2. The principles Since the predominant emphasis in the present survey will lie upon picture books that contain accompanying text, often specially structured text that is rhythmic and rhyming, three major aspects have to be considered: (a) the form and functions of the pictures; (b) the principles and procedures employed in the establishment of shared attention relative to these materials by mothers and children, and (c) the structure and functions of the accompanying texts. This last topic could be subdivided into an analysis of the text itself and into an exploration of the relationships between this text and the pictures. In order to avoid repetitions and to present the major points more concisely, these two aspects will be integrated in the discussion.

3. The form and function of pictures Before the form and influence of pictures can be meaningfully discussed, a brief check is in order to establish when the child recognizes pictures as representations of real objects, as contrasted to just seeing them as patterns of lines or blotches of colors. It has been repeatedly established that children recognize pictures as representations at the latest between the ages of 9 to 12 months; that is, before they acquire any extensive vocabulary even on the level of comprehension. Since the present discussion will focus upon the supportive function of picture books in language acquisition, it can be concluded that the basic premise, that children recognize pictures before they acquire extensive linguistic skills, is fulfilled. When pictures are recognized, children provide evidence for a first grasp of referential relationships. As Moerk (1977) has emphasized, adults establish for their children, at least in the Western cultures, a ‘symbolization gradient’. From real objects, to toys, to pictures, and finally to words, the relationship between the signified and the signifier becomes increasingly abstract and arbitrary. Even the perception of a real object does not entail all the aspects

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and possible functions of an object. Children’s later drawings indicate clearly that they drastically abstract some basic features, e.g., human beings being represented as stick figures. In the case of toys, the adult has already simplified and abstracted from the complex real object a prototype which he or she presents to the child. It is still three-dimensional and has substance, but many of the non-defining features have been omitted. Pictures obviously lose much of the three-dimensionality and all substantive aspects, but are still analogic. Words, finally are only arbitrarily related to their designata. Directly based upon this symbolization gradient is a simplification offered to the child for a problem that bothered Quine (1960) and many authors after him: Quine pondered how a person could know that a partner refers to a whole object, when he points and utters a word, and not only to some of its features or even to some of the many aspects of the background. Whereas some of the answers to this question have to be found in the principles of perception, such as figure/ground contrasts, etc., pictures provide important perceptual disambiguations. Obviously, in pictures, the object represented can be, and generally is, clearly contrasted from its background, or it is even presented without any background. Also, while in the case of objects non-defining features are intrinsically bound to the object the child is familiar with, in successive pictures of objects of the same category all the extraneous features can be varied systematically so that only the defining features remain consttant. Having emphasized the contrast between defining and arbitrary features, a further advantage of picture books over real objects follows logically. Pictures in books for infants generally consist of line drawings and not of photos. These line drawings allow not only the artist to select the most typical features for the representation, they make it also easier for the child to recognize the represented objects, as the research of Fraisse and McMurray (1960) has shown. Furthermore, in picture books, exemplars of classes are generally depicted in their prototypical form, with strong emphasis upon the defining features and considerable neglect of non-critical ones. The extensive research of Rosch and associates on prototypicality and its effects upon perception and labeling is consequently relevant in the consideration of the function of picture books. A preliminary survey (that needs, however, to be substantiated by systematic analyses) indicates that this elimination of non-critical features results in most items being depicted on a basic category level (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson and Boyes-Braem (1976)) or on a level of ‘usual utility’ (Brown (1958)). This prototypicality might be most important in respect to activities and relations, which in many aspects are more complex than simple objects. Activities and relations are in real life often quite fleeting and changing. They might therefore be difficult for the child to analyze, due to their nonpermanence. By contrast, in the case of pictures, the child can look at the activity in question as long as he/she wants and can return to the picture as

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often as he/she wants. The necessary analysis can therefore proceed slowly and gradually; pictures can be compared and possibly comparatively analyzed with the support of similar or different accompanying verbal labels. Pictures are not only more permanent than real events; in many cases the real exemplars are rarely or never accessible. Whether it is the tiger in the jungle, his pouncing upon the prey, the events of a train ride, or the forms and activities of ghosts, many parents might have little opportunity to introduce their children to the real objects and events. In the picture books, these events are, in contrast, reliably available and can be discussed and rehearsed at the pleasure of the communication partners. The last point is conceptually not separate: it was implied in all of the previous ones, but it may be worthwhile to emphasize it separately, since it might not be obvious. Most, or all, developmental psycholinguists are in agreement that the young child understands language mainly in the here and now, that is, upon the basis of environmental nonverbal support. Clark, Hutcheson and Van Buren (1974), for example, report that Clark’s son depended almost entirely on cues outside the verbal message in his interpretatation of adult utterances. Pictures, as expounded above, provide such external cues in an almost ideal form and they are always readily available. Since the match between nonverbal and verbal elements has been performed by the author/publisher, it will be quite easy for the adult to repeat this match in interactions with the child; and the repeated reenactments should make it easy for the child to grasp these matches.

4. The establishment

of joint attention between mother and child

In the previous section it was assumed, but not yet specifically explored, that mother and child had managed to establish joint attention upon which the conversation about pictures has to be based. The establishment of joint attention needs therefore to be briefly surveyed. For joint attention, both partners of the interaction have to focus upon the same content at the same time. The attention can become ‘joint’ in three ways: either partner A focuses upon a content first and partner B follows, or partner B takes the lead and partner A follows, or an event is so outstanding that both partners simultaneously attend to it as in the case of involuntary attention. This third phenomenon might happen relatively rarely and it might therefore be of little importance in language acquisition/transmission. It will therefore not be analyzed. If the child focuses upon a content first, several ways for the mother to discover this content exist: (a) If the child is actively handling the object, the situation is quite self-evident and the mother can just comment upon it. (b) For the more difficult situation, when the child is not handling the object, the

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research of Collis and Schaffer (1975) and Collis (1977) has demonstrated how the mother monitors her infant’s visual gaze in order to know what the child is attending to. (c) The child him- or herself does not only focus his attention upon specific objects, he/she engages in much communicative pointing. This can be pointing to an object while looking at the adult, pointing at an object in social context, or pointing in the book-reading situation. Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, and Volterra (1979) studied this type of pointing carefully and reported that it is highly correlated with shortly later appearing language behavior. Up to around his first birthday, the child generally takes the lead in focusing and the mother follows the child’s focus. Whereas such a situation is optimal in that the parent is responsive to the child’s immediate interest, it entails certain disadvantages, too. The adult with her much broader knowledge is in a passive position and both adult and child could easily remain restricted to the narrow horizon of the child. Such one-sided passivity might also be motivationally unsatisfactory for the adult. Murphy and Messer showed, accordingly, that from the time the infants were 9 months old, the mothers began increasingly to lead in attracting the children’s attention to new objects. Since children do not reliably follow the adult’s direction of gaze, more directive intervention from the side of the adult is required. One form this intervention can take is pointing, another is the exclamation ‘look’ or some similar word - often combined with pointing. Murphy and Messer (1977) reported that children can follow the direction of pointing from the age of 9 months on, although more complex situations, such as pointing across the midline and towards more remote objects, are mastered only later. Pointing, and the even simpler mechanism of showing an object held in the hand, are certainly used by parents quite frequently. Fowler and Swenson (1975) provided data as to their importance for vocabulary acquisition: out of the first 20 words of their infants, around two thirds had been first modeled by the parent while the parent himself did the pointing. The other third were modeled in response to the infants’ spontaneous interest in objects. But the mother has a much better means to establish joint attention at her disposal, i.e., picture books. In the case of picture books, the focus of attention is obviously the book and its pictures on a specific page. Mother and child sit closely together, hold the book in their hands and focus generally upon it. Neither the complexities of long distances nor of wide shifts in the line of gaze are encountered. Since, as discussed above, the pictures are generally prototypified and simplified, as contrasted to real objects and situations, the selection of specific items is facilitated too. Prolonged and repeated availability for analysis and discussion can eliminate any possible contrast/discrepancies in the contents the partners were attending to. Supporting this emphasis upon such a multiple disambiguation, when parents are employing picture books for the establishment of joint attention, is the report of Murphy (1978). In her study, the mothers, when discussing picture books with their infants, did not

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look at their faces to check whether the child followed the pointing gesture. In contrast, parents generally shift their gaze back and forth between the object of attention and the child’s face outside the picture book situation to reassure themselve that the joint attention is still maintained. Whether mother or child lead in the selection of objects in picture books, they can build upon this established common focus and specify through pointin&which specific item is selected for discussion.

5. The structure and functions of the accompanying texts Being aware of the endeavor to give an aspects of the very rhythmic, rhyming,

enormous variety of possible texts, I can, of course, not exhaustive discussion of all these varieties. Only the typical basic and early texts. especially as they pertain to their and generally simplifying aspects will be touched upon.

The rhythmic aspects. That strong rhythmic aspects are common in nursery rhymes is common enough knowledge. That children attend to them intensively and enjoy them greatly is partly supported by common sense knowledge and by specific reports in the literature. Friedlander (1970) for example, recorded an absolute maximum amount of self-selected listening to nursery rhymes (5,000 seconds per day) as compared to other forms of speech input (1,200-1,500 seconds per day). For older children, Chukovsky (1963) emphasized the ‘passionate delight’ they show in rhythmic and rhyming aspects of language; and the work of the Opies (Opie and Opie (1955)) provides supporting evidence in the large number of rhymes handed down over the centuries. Whereas relative consensus exists regarding the predominance and preference for such rhythmic phenomena in input to children, the implications of these facts for language acquisition, especially the early stages of acoustic pattern abstractionland the establishment of temporal expectancies have not yet been fully explorped. Some of the psychological implications are analyzed in the excellent articles of Jones (1976) and Martin (1972). The relevance of these broader analyses to the special topic of this paper needs to be explicated in separate studies. Here, it can only be indicated that the simplified regularities as present in rhythmic input provide both a motivating aspect for the young child to attend to the input carefully and over longer time periods, a means to facilitate the processing of the input through its prosodic redundancy, and support for the long-term storage of the structural features of sentence constituents and entire sentences. Werner and Kaplan (1963) provide a lucid discussion of the development and function of these complex rhythms. Besides the rhythmic aspect, the rhyming one is also highly obvious and greatly enjoyed by children. Rhymes, in one sense, are a special form of rhythm in that two elements resemble each other across a relatively uniform

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interval. Both the rhythmic patterning and the repetition of similar elements should therefore simplify the analysis of the input for the child since double redundancies are provided. These redundancies will allow the child to retain more of the input in short-term memory for processing. Since the rhyming element appears mostly at the end of semantic, or syntactic units, a recency effect is added for possible long-term memory storage. Similarly as rhymes were invented in the Middle Ages by monks as memory aids for their chants, so they can be memory aids for young children. That this phenomenon is utilized by mothers by producing incomplete utterances, omitting the rhyming elements, will be indicated in the next major section. That rhymes also provide a special opportunity for phonemic analysis is relatively obvious. In having highly similar words or syllables repeated, such as ‘mat’ rhyming with ‘cat’, etc., the analytic emphasis has to be focused upon the phoneme that produces the semantic contrast on the background of the overall phonetic similarity. Equally, or even morpe obviously, the repeated elements will stand out phonetically and the repetitions together with the position in the utterance sequence provide a special opportunity for their analysis, too. Obviously, many other patternings of sounds exist that support the maintenance and analysis of verbal interactions: Whereas in the case of the rhyme, sound similarity, rhythm, and a recency effect were combined, in the case of alliteration, the rhythm and similarity/identity of sounds are combined with a primacy effect, since these sounds appear at the beginnings of words. Assonance combines the repetition with word stress, and with chiasm, augmentation, diminuation, and related patterns, repetitions are combined with minor changes so that the differences underline the similarities of the common elements. Evidence for the density of these phenomena in normal mother-infant-interactions will be provided in Moerk (in preparation). That these sound plays should not only contribute much to the child’s enjoyment of the speech input and his/her appreciation of the playful qualities of language, but also to the phonetic analysis of the input is very probably. Many aspects pertaining to pattern discrimination could be specified in this input. A full analysis obviously awaits much further work. A further aspect of redundancy and therewith of support for pattern analysis is encountered in two forms of repetitiveness: in the case of rhythms, the rhythmic pattern is repeated over several or many utterance units, so that these patterns can be retained in short term memory and analyzed there. Similarly, many of these nursery rhymes are read or told repeatedly to the child, so that stored fragments from previous presentation can be integrated with later presentations, can provide expectancies for these later presentations, and can therefore facilitate the pattern abstraction for the entire sequence. Finally, it is self-evident that such repetitiveness, either of items reappearing within the story or of stories with the same items being told/read repeatedly to children, presents not only an opportunity for rehearsal and for the analysis of

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patterns, but also for their long-term storage. Underwood and Schultz’s (1960) ‘spew hypothesis’ refers most directly to this phenomenon. This hypothesis specifies that the frequency with which verbal units have been experienced, directly determines their availability as responses in new associative connections. Although this hypothesis is based upon word-association studies, the same principle should apply to the availability of words for renewed phonetic analysis and to their use in syntactic constructions, i.e., in spontaneous speech. This is proven by the studies recently summarized by Cirrin (1983), showing that lexical access for children is mainly a function of input frequency and unambiguous codability. The unambiguous codability is, as indicated above, provided by the prototypicality of pictures in picture books. Recent reports (e.g., Clark (1974) Peters (1980)) on the learning and reproduction of extended routines by children indicate such learning of patterns on the basis of repetition, too, whether the remembered items stem from everyday routine utterances or from the input of nursery rhymes. Related to this emphasis upon the use of redundancy by children are the often encountered, although largely informal, reports that children insist upon sameness in the repetitions of stories and can become quite upset about variations. Katz (1927), for example, found that her subjects critically remarked upon minor changes in the text during repetitions of fairy tales and insisted upon correcting the narrator. The more variations are incorporated into the repetitions, the less the redundancy will be and the less children can rely upon previously established analyses in their striving for complete mastery.

6. The processes It is not yet known for certain whether picture books and the accompanying verbal material are intensively employed during all periods of early language development, or more predominantly at specific levels of skills. Moerk (1974, 1975), in a cross-sectional study of preschoolers, reported a relatively brief peak utilization of this material with a rapid decline thereafter. Moerk and Moerk (1979), in a detailed analysis of one child, demonstrated a delayed onset in the child’s utilization of material from nursery books as compared to the same child’s utilization of material from everyday conversational input. Certainly, the content and form of the nursery books read to and with young children change, as parents and publishers adapt to the increasing sophistication of the preschoolers (Opie and Opie (1955)). Since content, form, and level of mastery of the child change, it can be taken for granted that the processes utilized will change, too. Fine age differentiations in the description of these processes would therefore be required. Since relatively few studies exist in the field, these fine age differentiations cannot always be provided yet. Whenever there is evidence for

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differences with age and language level, this evidence will be included. Without such specific evidence, processes will be discussed with the understanding that they may not apply to all ages and at all language levels. The processes will be described separately for mothers and children, although this separation is certainly artificial, since the processes are built upon feedback between both partners of the dyad. This format has been chosen for expository purposes, and the feedback aspects will be mentioned whenever needed for the purposes of explanation. It appears that the, phonetic/phonemic potential for language acquisition encountered in nursery rhymes has only been minimally attended to. Papousek and Papousek (1981) present an important exception in their analysis of nursery songs and of how very young children learn to sing a song. The reader is referred to their work for a sophisticated discussion of this complex topic. Vocabulary teaching. The usefulness of picture books and their accompanying texts for the transmission of vocabulary knowledge has been most often discussed, and also partly substantiated. A recent report by Ninio and Bruner (1978) suggests that they might be the most important means for vocabulary transmission. They report that 76 percent of all observed naming by the mother occurred in picture book sequences. Snow (1977) similarly reports the use of many tutorial questions, i.e., ‘What is it?‘, ‘Where is. . . .?’ by mothers in book-reading situations. In quite close agreement with Ninio and Bruner, Wheeler (1983) reports for the younger child she studied that 62 percent of the mother’s utterances were descriptions of the pictures. And Ninio (1980a) adds that mothers’ labels, in picture book reading, tend to refer to whole objects (Bruner (1981), Ninio (1980a)). Whereas considerable consensus exists in regard to this labeling instruction by the mother, several specifications were already mentioned in the preceding sentences. The first pertains to the age of the child or to the language level, whichever is reported by the diverse investigators. It is generally found that the simple labeling exercises are performed mainly with younger children. For these subjects, somewhere between one and one-and-a-half years of age, the mother provides the label, whether she herself draws the attention of the child to a picture or whether the child points towards it (Murphy (1978), Ninio and Bruner (1978)). From around 14 months on, an increasing percentage of these labeling exercises takes the form that the mother asks a tutorial question, the child answers it, and the mother confirms or disconfirms the answer. Snow (1978) reports a complete shift in these instructional interactions between 12 and 18 months for one of her children. When Mary was 12 months old, her mother provided all the labels herself, whereas at 18 months, Mary provided 12 answers to 12 questions, even if twice incorrectly. Wheeler (1983), too, sees a shift from around 62 percent descriptions by the mother at the age of around one-and-a-half years to only 37 percent after the age of 2.5 years. With the

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increasing language level of the child, a shift from label provision and rehearsal sustained by the mother to testing and feedback is indicated by these data. Moerk (1972) provided examples that this testing often employs the facilitating effects of rhymes. The mother omits the second element of the rhyme in her incomplete sentence and the child adds it and thereby completes the sentence. The same phenomena are found frequently in a variety of transcripts. Not only do the instructional techniques of the mothers change, but also the instructional contents. Murphy (1978) reports that, at 24 months, mothers and infants interact in the form of ‘pointing strings’, i.e., a series of pointing gestures without clear interruption shifting from object to object or more generally from one feature of the same object to another, such as a cat’s whiskers, ears, eyes, etc. Bloom (1970) provides a nice example of such a pointing string: Gia (1.12 morphemes/utterance) looks at a picture of a girl in a bathtub with a toy fish. She begins:

Gia: Adult: Gia : Adult: Gia: Adult: Gia :

bath a bath girl fish. fish fish. Who’s taking a bath? fish (pointing to the fish) fish water

Moerk (1972) shows that such ‘pointing strings’ are soon generalized to situations outsides the picture book discussion. When Jody (1.8 years) encountered an unfamiliar observer in her home, she initiated the following sentence:

Jody : Mother: Jody : Mother: Jody : Mother: Jody: Mother: Jody : Mother:

Man (pointing to the observer) Man. Mmm Hmm. Man shoes Man and shoes. That’s right. Man (n) socks. And socks. (n) soirt. And what? Sirt Shirt. Oh yeah.

Similarly, Wheeler (1983) reports a decline in simple naming from 83 percent around one-and-a-half years to 46 percent around 2.5 years and 22 percent around 3.5 years. In contrast, multiple comments, such as The boy is pulling a

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wagon increased over the same age periods from 15 to 41 percent and then decreased at age 3.5 to 33 percent. The even more complex remarks, which Wheeler labelled ‘Interpretive’, such as Is that like your wagon?, increased over the age period from 2 percent to 12 and finally 45 percent of the mother’s utterances. Many of the conversational examples found in Howe (1981) indicate how the mothers introduce a large range of linguistic elaborations. Syntactic teaching. These last remarks already indicate a shift in the mother’s instructional activity from the simple vocabulary teaching in the form of equational sentences ‘That is.. . ’ to the modeling of more complex sentences. In accord with these indications, several authors report upon grammatical aspects of the mothers’ utterances in the book-reading situation as contrasted to their other speech forms. Snow, Arlman-Rupp, Hassing, Jobse, Joosten and Vorster (1976) found that mothers’ speech was more complicated and elaborate in the book reading situation than during free play. Similarly Bakker-Rennes and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1974) reported that mothers’ speech was most complex in book reading situations, as measured by length of utterance and length of paraphrase, when compared to caretaking, playing, and lunch conversations. Dunn and Wooding (1977) specify that mothers’ speech includes more extensions of the child’s utterances and more comments which elaborate on items, when mother and child are looking at representational material. The same authors stress the mothers’ ‘explicit teaching’ in these situations. It is, of course, well known that written material is generally more complex than spontaneous speech. Since the mother often relies upon the written text in the discussion of picture books, the complexity of her speech would almost automatically be increased independently of her instructional intentions. Since the verbal messages are disambiguated by the pictorial material, the child will also be better able to grasp the meaning of these complex utterances.

The infant’s referential exercises in the The child’s vocabulary learning. context of picture books start already before the full beginning of vocabulary learning. Bates et al. (1979), as referred to above, have carefully described the development of noncommunicative but referential pointing when the child examines small figures in books. Similar pointing in interactional settings were described by Murphy (1978) for the nine-months-old infant who points at pictures and whose mother provides the labels for them. Ninio and Bruner (1978) follow a period of development from the time before and around the first birthday, when mothers accepted all vocalizations as attempts at labeling, to the age of 14 months, when they insisted by means of ‘what’s that?’ questions upon something resembling a real label. Snow et al. (1979) report that the child around 18 months is already quite capable of answering maternal questions as to the labels of pictured objects. For the ages of 20 months and 20 to 24 months, Bates et al. (1979), and Murphy (1978) report that the child has

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already nicely coordinated gestural and linguistic deixis. For the period after 2 years of age, Moerk and Moerk (1979) have demonstrated in a fine-grained analysis how new and rare vocabulary items appear preponderantly in quotations from literary sources. Although the sources surveyed generally do not base themselves upon extensive samples, and none of the individual studies covers the entire age range, their combinations suggest that for the period from shortly before the age of one year to around 3 years, young children make very active use of picture books and the accompanying verbal information, thereby familiarizing themselves with new referents and extending their vocabulary repertoire. The verbal information can be provided by mothers as simple verbal labels, the text of the book can be read by her, or she can test the child’s recognition and recall of specific items. The child’s learning of grammar. The problem of grammar acquisition is more challenging than that of vocabulary learning. It is certainly more controversial due to the emphasis upon syntactic aspects of language in the recent past. The child encounters also a more difficult problem in abstracting underlying patterns that are mainly distributional and relational, but not directly reflected in the surface structure. In addition, even if it is now generally agreed upon that adult input to children is considerably simplified, individual utterances are still produced relatively rapidly and last only briefly, so that it might be very difficult for the child to retain an entire utterance in short-term memory in order to analyze it. Brown and Fraser (1963) and more recently Clark (1977) have therefore plausibly suggested that the child might extract grammatical information not so much from the input that is so fleeting and therefore hard to analyze, as from sequences they use themselves, at first unanalyzed and based upon imitation, and later more and more finely analyzed. In addition to some standing phrases and conversation items employed for everyday practical purposes, picture books with their accompanying texts might be ideally suited for this process, since the texts remain constant, are soon learned by heart, at least in part, and are also supported by pictorial material which helps the child to understand the underlying menaing relationships. Several sources support this suggestion. Sachs (1980) reported that her daughter, when ‘reading’ from books at around 14 months of age, mixed jargon with a few known words, i.e., she had analyzed out of the stream of sound a few elements. On a somewhat more advanced level, Carlson and Anisfeld (1969), and especially Clark (1974), reported that children employ reduced imitations, either from nursery rhyme materials or other input, and combine them meaningfully with newly formulated elements. This strategy allows them to produce more complex utterances than they could if they would have to synthesize all elements themselves. Longhurst and Grubb (1974)

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compared language samples of children elicited with pictures and those elicited with objects and found, too, that picture elicitation led to more advanced language. For the age after around 2 years, Moerk and Moerk (1979) provide again the most detailed analysis of how their daughter produced her most advanced forms, both on the level of morphology and syntax, when she utilized quotations from her story books. They also argued that many of these quotations became productive later on in being applied meaningfully, and often in partially changed form, to new communicational situations. After the child has employed familiar texts in this manner, Schumaker (1976) showed that mothers expand their two-year-olds’ picture labels into more complete sentences and that the children thereafter use these expansions increasingly in a spontaneous manner. A triple form of enrichment is observed when all these studies are taken together: first, the pictures support more complex language products; then the texts of the picture books provide models for advanced linguistic structures, and finally, the mothers add elements and improve upon the children’s formulations whereever the latter still showed weaknesses. The evidence surveyed heretofore, even if it is not fully comprehensive for all age levels and does not include large samples of children, certainly suggests that picture books and their accompanying stories are intensively utilized by mothers and children to teach and learn language skills, respectively, that are just on the edge of the children’s analytic and synthetic competence. If this hypothesis is accepted, then an apparently discordant piece of information needs to be considered carefully. Moerk (1974, 1975) reported from a larger sample, even if only on a cross-sectional basis, that the utilization of picture books and conversational interactions declines steeply for both mothers and children with increasing language level of the children and that above a MLU of around three syllables per utterance the utilization of picture books becomes almost nonexistent. Moerk (1975) reported correlatioons of - 0.61 for both the mcther’s and child’s use of picture books with the child’s language level, and regression equations of Y = 19.27-3.77 X and Y = 32.80-6.57 X for mother and child, respectively. (Y stood for the frequency of the employment of picture books and X for the mean length of utterance of the child.) These findings suggest that after around 2.5 years of age and at a language level of around 3 to 4 morphemes per utterance, a time when children certainly have not yet mastered their mother tongue to a large degree, the use of picture books is found less fruitful. This apparent contrast between the high degree of utilization of picture books and nursery rhymes for the early stages of language development and the apparent sudden abandonment of them can, at present, not yet be fully resolved. No other studies, known to the writer, report about the use or disuse of nursery books at those later language levels/ages, so that the possibility of sample bias certainly has to be considered. Moerk, in his two studies, used data

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from only 5 and 20 subjects, respectively, which could easily have resulted in random fluctuations. It is, however, suggested that the explanation might lie on a different level: as especially Sachs (1980) has emphasized, both pretend play and the discussion of picture stories represent steps for the development of the narrative function of language. This narrative function will at later ages include talking about past events, free storytelling, and planning for the future. For the young child, who still needs nonverbal environmental support to analyze linguistic input, picture books introduce ideally the narrative aspect together with the situational support for the interpretation of the linguistic narrative. Even first graders still remember more of a story they have heard, when they were exposed to an illustration of the story (Lesgold et al. (1975) Lesgold and De Good (1976)). With progressing linguistic skills of the child, this narrative competence is well enough developed, so that neither mothers nor children need to rely much upon the combination of pictorial support and linguistic interpretation to assure comprehension of the narrative by the child. At least in the situation of naturalistic observations in the home, mothers and children are consequently secure enough, when the child is around 3 years of age, that they do not need to rely anymore upon these, what Moerk (1975) called, ‘more primitive interactional forms’. This advancement does not, however, mean that children will not learn any language skills anymore from stories read to them or later from their own reading of stories. Informal observations of the writer’s own daughter up to the age of almost 10 years have shown repeatedly how she picked up new syntactic constructions and especially vocabulary items. It happens at present every few days that this daughter, who has remained an avid, if not voracious, reader, approaches her father with the question ‘What does X mean?‘. She encountered an unknown word, mostly in one of the books she was reading, and her inquiry serves to clarify its meaning. That continued reading leads to increased language mastery is known to every teacher and every literary person, even if psychologists have not yet explored this topic (Freedle and Carol1 (1972)). But, such lifelong refinement of a skill probably involves processes different from the initial acquisition of the skill. That these refinements might appear earlier than the preponderant emphasis upon vocabulary teaching in the book-reading situation suggests is suggested by the case of Moerk and Moerk’s daughter (1979). This girl, mainly between the ages of 25 to 31 months, produced percentagewise by far the largest amount of new and rare morphological items in her ‘quotations’ from books and nursery rhymes. Whereas in her spontaneous speech, the relationship between correct and incorrect forms in these morphological items was 67 : 10, in her quotations it was 59: 0, that is, quotations seemed to serve ideally for the learning of the correct morphological forms. In addition, during the diverse sessions, most of her quotations from literary sources involved complex sentences, whereas in her spontaneous speech she employed still more

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simple sentence forms. These complex sentences entailed coordinated clauses, subordinate clauses with non-finite verbs, and subordinate clauses with finite verbs. Within individual clauses, two prepositional phrases or two adverbials were quite common, entailing a large variety of prepositions. More detailed analyses and, most of all, larger numbers of subjects are needed to confirm these suggestive findings. When integrating the processes discussed separately for mother and child into their interactional framework, one can discern several developmentally progressive routines with some certainty: on a most primordial level, the interaction consists of the establishment of joint attention, whereby the child focuses upon an object and the mother labels it. Soon thereafter, the mother arouses the child’s attention through pointing and an exclamation ‘look/see’, whereupon she provides the label. Up to now, the mother does all the overt linguistic work. The child merely needs to analyze and store the acoustic pattern in its association with the pictured item. On the next level, the mother can prod the child with ‘Where is.. . .?’ questions and the child can point towards the object labeled. This level involves a rehearsal of the acoustic pattern of the vocabulary item, but it also serves to test whether the child has learned the meaning, i.e., can select the item referred to. Only recognition, but no spontaneous recall is needed yet. More complicated processes are involved when the mother asks ‘What is this?’ questions. Here, the test is one of recall and the child also has to produce the phonetic pattern of the word. Corrective phonetic and vocabulary feedback can be added by the mother when she responds to partial successes or complete failures of the child. Detailed quantitative analyses for these sequential dependencies are provided in Ninio (1983). From her impressive evidence, Ninio (1983 : 450) concludes “that mothers exhibited a high degree of sensitivity to signals of word knowledge or lack of it in their children and chose their subsequent move accordingly”. They provide corrections in 99 percent of the cases when the child makes an error (Snow and Goldfield (1983)). Often tied in with one of the preceding forms of naming is the following, more complicated sequence, wherein naming is combined with a feature analysis of the object in question. As in Murphy’s (1978) ‘pointing strings’ or Bloom’s (1970) above quoted example, this feature analysis can involve mainly nouns as descriptors or it can result in adjective training. Whether the one or the other alternative are chosen, different syntactic patterns can be exercised. Cognitively - and it seems also temporally - related in the transcripts surveyed is a further phenomenon, that of the differentiation of major classes from subclasses, such as: ‘Yes, it is a dog, a German Shepherd, and this is a poodle’. More linguistic complexity is introduced when the mother supplements labels with descriptions of activities and subsequently with ‘What is X doing?’ questions (see Howe (1981 : 78) for several examples). Here, too, a shift from the equational sentence frame to the full-verb sentence frame is involved. The

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emphasis upon activities entails necessarily an enlargement of the child’s verb vocabulary. In relating several actions and objects to each other, complex sentences and relatively rare prepositional phrases can be employed. Additionally, in establishing narratives that connect successive pictures, temporal adverbs and temporal morphemes need to be included. Since these increases in complexity are established in the course of the verbal interactions between mothers and their children, a large range of interactional phenomena comes into play. How complex and informative these phenomena can be has been expounded in great detail by Moerk (1983). Although his descriptions apply to verbal interactions generally, and not specifically to picture book reading, it can be confidently concluded that the interactions in the picture book situations should at least be equally complex since, as summarized above, the verbal utterances of both mothers and children are more complex in the latter situation. It would obviously be by far premature to propose the above descriptions as either universal in their sequencing or in their applicability to all children from diverse backgrounds. It is also improbable that the majority of phenomena have already been noticed and described in the scant literature. The above descriptions and sequential analyses can, therefore, be only considered as tentative hypotheses, to be evaluated or refined by hopefully intensified research in this field. The resulting findings might be of great value for the efforts to achieve a ‘literate society’ (Carroll and Chall (1975)).

7. Conclusions The questions of how picture books and their accompanying nursery rhymes contribute to first language acquisition are barely being formulated yet. Most authors who refer at all to this topic provide more tantalizing suggestions and hints than established knowledge. From the rather exhaustive literature search that was undertaken for this report, it appears that only Bruner and associates (Ninio and Bruner (1978), Ninio (1980a)) have focused in some detail on the range of possible influences and the processes involved in bringing them about. Especially the rather detailed discussion by Bruner (1983: 78-86) entails a range of implications for the explanation of language transmission/acquisition that deserve close attention. Reflecting the unfinished state of the field, the present conclusions are more intended to point towards several challenging research problems than to provide an integration of knowledge which does not yet exist. In accordance with some of the suggestions provided above in section 2, the pictures in the picture books have to be analyzed systematically to establish how far they provide a bridge towards symbolization, and how far they simplify the referential and selective problem discussed by Quine (1960) and

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exemplified by Ferrier (1978). Also, the texts accompanying these pictures have to be studied carefully to describe all their characteristics besides the obvious ones, i.e., the rhythmic, rhyming characteristics. Analyses in progress suggest a large number of specific phonetic phenomena, such as alliterations, assonance, consonance, chiasm, augmentation, diminuation, together with a wide variety of rhyming phenomena, e.g., internal, approximative, and identical rhymes, that should be optimal for the early phonetic analyses infants have to make. That they might also be excellent memory props is suggested from common experience and some research reports. An analysis of nursery texts, paralleling that which Ferguson (1977) provided for baby talk, would probably indicate considerable structural and functional similarities between the two, together with a developmental progression from baby talk to nursery texts. Informal surveys over several of these texts suggest that their careful analysis would uncover structural regularities very similar to those that Weir (1962) demonstrated in pre-sleep monologues. If the suggestions made throughout much of this paper are approximately accurate, then the text in many of the picture story books should represent an optimal ‘motherese’, ready-packaged and presented in a stimulating way for those mothers who might not have the capacity or inclination to gradually develop their idiosyncratic motherese in interaction with their infants. Characteristics that are most conducive to attract the infant’s attention seem to be incorporated in these texts. Focused attention plus textual redundancies should lead to better retention. And finally, prolonged retention and repeated use can form the basis for the structural/syntactic analysis of the initially unanalyzed routines. Since these texts are utilized by mothers and their infants in their individualized interactions, it also needs to be explored in greater detail how mothers adapt the provided material to their child’s language level and expand upon it conversationally. It was suggested in the preceding sections that some of the maternal instructional techniques, abstracted from conversational mother-infant interactions, could be appended to the reading of the picture books. Whereas this appears probable from the available information, it certainly needs to be substantiated through more systematic studies. Since it has repeatedly been encountered that the interactional patterns differ quite profoundly if mothers try to get, for example, new and unexpected commands across as contrasted with the discussion of well-established topics, interactional divergencies have to be expected in the picture book context, too. Ninio and Bruner’s (1978) four utterance types: establishing joing attention; providing a label; asking ‘What’s that?’ questions, and confirming the correctness of the child’s label, apply at best only to the early stages of labeling and probably not even here universally for all mothers and children. Similarly, as mothers employ their teaching techniques when explaining nursery books to their children, the children expand upon the textual material

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by employing a variety of mastery strategies. Carlson and Anisfeld (1967) Clark (1974) and White (1954) have provided some preliminary evidence of how the children employ quotations from nursery book stories, first relatively rigidly and not fully fitting to the immediate situation, and how they gradually become more flexible and selective in substituting, rearranging, and partially changing items, until the borderline between borrowed quotes and spontaneous productions becomes indiscernible. The data of Moerk and Moerk (1979) provide only some detailed glimpses into this fascinating process of increasing analytical mastery by the child over his or her communicational tools. That the later word-plays and topsy-turvy rhymes, as mainly collected by Chukovsky (1963) and the Opies (Opie and Opie (1955)) might contribute much to this analytical proficiency can only be surmised at present. The delight in, and fascination with, Pig Latin and with a large variety of secret languages by elementary school and older children indicates further progress in the metalinguistic mastery of their language skills. The puns and poetry of adults may provide the end-point of this long developmental process. When considering the applications of, and the extrapolations from, nursery stories, it remains also to compare these nursery story texts, both in regard to their themes and their linguistic forms, to the pretend play of children and their mothers as it is increasingly explored (e.g., Kavanaugh, Whittington, and Cerbone (1983)). Continuities and borrowing are certainly possible and they have been found quite consistently in the child described by Moerk and Moerk (1979). Equally as mothers enrich the pretend play of their children (Dunn and Wooding (1977)) so the nursery story might enrich both the children’s and the mothers’ fantasy and contribute to more complex language behavior in both. Finally, nursery books and their use could provide the incentive for the exploration of the development of narrative skills, in comprehension and production, which have recently been neglected due to the emphasis upon the utilitarian asnects of mother-child interactions.

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