In this article, we begin by discussing approximately thirty picture books dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic published digitally in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other English-speaking countries in the first six months of 2020. The worldwide impact of COVID-19 resulted in the rapid global digital publication of numerous…

Toddlers learn more about the world from picture books with photographs instead of drawings, but commercial books often have tactile features such as flaps that may counterintuitively hinder learning. This study tested how lift-the-flap features in a commercial picture book of first words affected 2-year-olds' (N = 32) learning of a new word for…

The author relates their involvement in the process of testing a picture storybook to teach science concepts. The project asked: If children were learning through a story where the science content was explicit, would children be able to explain the science in the context of the story and then in real-world contexts? Would the learning become…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

Little is known about how hearing adults learn sign languages. Our objective in this study was to investigate how learners of British Sign Language (BSL) produce narratives, and we focused in particular on viewpoint-taking. Twenty-three intermediate-level learners of BSL and 10 deaf native/early signers produced a narrative in BSL using the…

What happens in the early years of a child's life has a profound impact on the rest of their life. This significant and influential phase in visual, language and emotional development lays the foundation for lifelong health, learning and earning potential. In August 2021 National Literacy Trust commissioned Savanta ComRes to conduct a survey of…

Recent years have seen a significant interest in Theory of Mind (ToM), the specific groups in which it may be restricted and the opportunities which might enhance or suppress development. Previous studies have identified gaps in the literature concerning ideas for intervention and strategies which may augment the development of ToM skills.…

This study of 4- to 6-year-olds had 2 aims: first, to determine how lower level comprehension skills (receptive vocabulary and grammar) and verbal memory support early higher level comprehension skills (inference and literal story comprehension), and second, to establish the predictive power of these skills on subsequent reading comprehension.…

Where are all the disabled people in children's picture books? This article will introduce an innovative three-year project, based in the United Kingdom, which asks this question of the book world. In The Picture, managed by disability charity Scope, aims to point out the invisibility of disabled people in children's media to publishers, writers…

Since 2002, Creative Partnerships, based at the Arts Council of England, has been investing time, energy, and resources to bring artists and schools together. Their goal is to "animate the national curriculum and to enrich school life by making the best use of the United Kingdom's creative wealth." This article concentrates on the…

This small-scale piece of research stemmed from a larger study on oral storytelling and the responses of children to stories told and read to them. In the larger study several children expressed preferences for stories from picture books, as "told" stories were not "real" stories. This concept of "real" stories and…

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to carry out intended actions in the future (e.g., posting a letter on the way to school or passing on a message) and is important for children's independent functioning in daily life. This study examined, for the first time, the effects of incidental reminder cues on children's PM. Five- and 7-year-old…

Two previous studies mapping university mathematics students' summative assessment diet in the UK revealed a clear picture. In general, there was a dominance of closed book examinations with a strong relationship to departmental league table position. The decade since then has seen many changes in higher education in the UK, particularly in the…

This paper discusses the issue of oral versus sign language in educating people who are deaf, focusing on Hungary, which currently emphasizes oralism and discourages the use of Hungarian Sign Language. Teachers of people who are hearing impaired are trained to use the acoustic channel and view signing as an obstacle to the integration of deaf…

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., "*£5 was cost by the book"), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is…