Picture books aid 'infant development'
Parents should read to their young children for 40 minutes every day, the study claims
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Monday, 06, Nov 2006 08:27
The traditional act of reading young children a bedtime story may do more than helping them go to sleep.
Scientists claim that toddlers can learn complex actions and decision making processes from picture book reading, which apparently improves their perception, as well as interpretive and comprehensive skills.
The joint study from psychologists at the University of Queensland, Australia, and the University of Virginia, says that picture books help infants to develop a greater understanding of the world around them and advises parents to read to their young children for at least 40 minutes every day.
The researchers arrived at their findings by way of two separate tests, which involved 132 young children aged 18, 24 or 30-months-old.
In the first test the toddlers were divided into two groups and given either a book of six photographs or six colour drawings that showed how to make a simple baby's rattle.
The children were then given the materials needed to assemble the toy, with only the youngest age group struggling to use the pencil drawings in the picture book.
"This research shows that very young children can learn to perform novel actions with novel objects from a brief picture-book reading interaction," report author Gabrielle Simcock from the University of Queensland told the Development Psychology journal of the American Psychological Association.
"This common form of interaction that takes place very early in children's lives may provide an important source of information to them about the world around them."
In a follow-up test involving children aged 24 and 30 months, black and white line drawings were found to be less successful in helping infants to better understand their surroundings.
But Dr Simcock concluded: "The results expand our understanding of the development of pictorial competence in the second year of life and point to an interaction between symbolic and general representational capacities in the performance of very young children."