Picture books: a child’s first textbook

We constructed a large-scale corpus of Japanese picture books and analyzed the relationship between words that appear in those books and child vocabulary acquisition. Although previous studies have suggested that picture book reading promotes child vocabulary acquisition, the effect has not been fully examined due to lack of picture book corpora. In our study, we found a strong correlation between the age of acquisition for basic-level nouns such as animal names and the frequency of the word in picture books. Verbs required a larger frequency for acquisition compared to basic-level nouns. The relationship between age of acquisition and frequency of words in picture books can indicate the difficulty of acquisition for a given word. Based on these findings, we can improve educational support systems such as recommending picture books according to an individual’s vocabulary level.

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