An Open Book: What and How Young Children Learn From Picture and Story Books

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Editorial

10 November 2015

Editorial: An Open Book: What and How Young Children Learn from Picture and Story Books

Jessica S. Horst

and

Carmel Houston-Price

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22 citations

Editors

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Jessica S Horst

University of Sussex

Carmel Houston-Price

University of Reading

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Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children’s general knowledge, understanding about the world and promotes language acquisition. Capitalising on children’s natural love of books, recent research indicates that both socio-pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms underlie what and how young children benefit from looking at and listening to picture and story books. The aim of this Research Topic is to foster an interdisciplinary exchange of the methods that have been used to uncover how and what young children learn from books and the knowledge that this work has revealed. Moreover, this collection of papers seeks both to demonstrate the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and to further our understanding of the mechanisms that support this learning. As such this Research Topic will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children’s learning.

We encourage authors to submit basic research from any theoretical perspective. We welcome original research articles, reviews, hypothesis and theory articles, methodological articles, and brief commentaries or opinion pieces.

Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children’s general knowledge, understanding about the world and promotes language acquisition. Capitalising on children’s natural love of books, recent research indicates that both socio-pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms underlie what and how young children benefit from looking at and listening to picture and story books. The aim of this Research Topic is to foster an interdisciplinary exchange of the methods that have been used to uncover how and what young children learn from books and the knowledge that this work has revealed. Moreover, this collection of papers seeks both to demonstrate the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and to further our understanding of the mechanisms that support this learning. As such this Research Topic will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children’s learning.

We encourage authors to submit basic research from any theoretical perspective. We welcome original research articles, reviews, hypothesis and theory articles, methodological articles, and brief commentaries or opinion pieces.

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Editors

Jessica S Horst

University of Sussex

Carmel Houston-Price

University of Reading

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353,936 Total views

275,319 Article views

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Frontiers in Psychology

Developmental Psychology

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