Focusing on the cognitive processes at work during shared storybook reading helps us illuminate the domain-general learning mechanisms that support such word learning, effectively bridging the gap between our understanding of how children learn in naturalistic settings, such as when a parent reads a storybook, to more artificial settings, such as fast mapping by mutual exclusivity experiments. Through repeated exposures to the same storybook texts and illustrations children are able to form a robust representation of a new word because such contextual repetition helps lower the attentional demands of word learning. The authors explain their results in terms of the benefit of contextual repetition. That is, only for these children did the novel words become known words. All children performed well on the initial test immediately following the shared storybook reading, however, only children who had heard the same stories repeatedly retained the word-object associations when tested 1 week later. (2011a) demonstrated that 3-year-old children learned more novel words from shared storybook reading when the same three storybooks were read repeatedly, than when nine different storybooks were read. Thus, shared storybook reading clearly plays an important role in early word learning. Moreover, the number of times parents read to their children and the number of trips to the library predict both children's receptive and expressive vocabulary sizes ( Arterberry et al., 2007). Importantly, repeatedly being read the same storybook facilitates word learning ( Sénéchal, 1997 Horst et al., 2011a McLeod and McDade, 2011 Wilkinson and Houston-Price, in press). Further, repetition can actually increase enjoyment from videos and stories ( Crawley et al., 1999 Leavitt and Christenfeld, 2011). As any parent can attest, it is not uncommon for young children to ask for a book (or video) to be repeated ( Sulzby, 1985 Crawley et al., 1999). Before age six, up to 80% of children are read a story each day ( Rideout et al., 2003). As early as 8 months of age, children begin learning words that frequently occur in stories read to them ( Jusczyk and Hohne, 1997). One common way in which young children encounter new words is via shared storybook reading ( Sénéchal, 1997). Moreover, the phrase “novel word” (and also “novel object”) is really shorthand for academics to differentiate between names of varying degrees of familiarity. Through repeated exposures across a variety of contexts any word has the potential to become a known word. Eventually, the child is able to reliably detect the word's referent, even after delays and in a variety of contexts, and ultimately to produce the word himself-at these points we might refer to the word as a “known word.” Thus, novel and known words exist on a continuum of novelty to familiarity.
Over time, the word will become increasingly familiar as the child learns some of the statistical regularities of how the word is used. Importantly, then, as the word is repeatedly encountered, additional opportunities to store relevant information are presented, facilitating the creation of a more robust representation (see also, Yu and Smith, 2007 Horst and Samuelson, 2008 McMurray et al., 2012).
Although some learning does occur during fast mapping when words are initially encountered ( Horst et al., 2006 Carey, 2010), one encounter seldom provides sufficient experience to support robust word learning ( Horst and Samuelson, 2008 Mather and Plunkett, 2009). The first time a word is encountered, the child (or other learner) is provided with an opportunity to store some information about that word, for example, how it sounded, who said it, which possible referents were present, etc. Across all word learning situations, each “known” word first begins as a novel word ( Horst et al., 2006 see also Gathercole, 2006).
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