Past events: Kate Nation. ‘Book language’and its implications for children’s language, literacy, and development

What: ‘Book language’ and its implications for children’s language, literacy, and development

Where: BCBL Auditorium and zoom room # 2 (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Kate Nation. PhD, Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, UK

When:  Thursday,  March 21st at 12:00 PM noon.

The onset of literacy marks a significant change in children’s development. Written language is more complex than everyday conversation and even books targeted at pre-schoolers contain more varied words and more complex syntax than child-directed speech. I will review the nature and content of children’s ‘book language’, focusing on recent large-scale corpus analyses that systematically compare written and spoken language. I argue that exposure to book language provides opportunities for learning words and syntactic constructions that are only rarely encountered in speech and that in turn, this rich experience drives further developments in language and literacy. We will also reflect on the range, variety, depth, and sophistication of book language and consider how it may be key input that promotes children’s social and emotional development. Becoming literate changes things, and we need to better understand how and why reading experience shapes our minds and becomes associated with a range of skills and abilities across the lifespan.