Translational Issues in Psychological Science © 2017 American Psychological Association

2017, Vol. 3, No. 1, 5–18 2332-2136/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tps0000085

A Matter of Principle: Applying Language Science

to the Classroom and Beyond

Brenna Hassinger-Das Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

and Tamara Spiewak Toub Temple University and Brookings Institution,
Temple University Washington, DC

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

University of Delaware
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

Strong language skills are critical for developing literacy, social skills, mathematics,
and executive function skills. However, homes and classrooms often do not provide the
key elements necessary for improving children’s language outcomes. After reviewing
the evidence for the six principles of language development—which have been distilled
from the language science literature—this article describes an educational intervention
that was designed using these principles as a foundation. The Read–Play–Learn project
is used as a model to demonstrate how the application of the six principles of language
development provides a guiding blueprint for implementing language science in the
real world. Barriers to application are also discussed alongside recommendations for
future research expanding the use of the six principles of language development beyond
the classroom and into homes and community settings.

What is the significance of this article for the general public?

This article demonstrates the efficacy of building upon a solid foundation in
language science for applied work in schools, homes, and community contexts by
describing a classroom language intervention with preschoolers from economically
disadvantaged backgrounds built on six core principles of language development
(frequency, interest, contingency, meaningfulness, diversity, and reciprocity).

Keywords: language development, education, practical application, language outcomes

Language is the single best predictor of chil- related to one another and, beyond their natural
dren’s later academic success (Hoff, 2013). connection to literacy, they also facilitate social
Language production and comprehension are and emotional development (Roben, Cole, &
Armstrong, 2013), support the learning of aca-
demic content area knowledge (LeFevre et al.,
2010), and promote the growth of executive
Brenna Hassinger-Das and Tamara Spiewak Toub, De- functioning skills, such as attention and work-
partment of Psychology, Temple University; Kathy Hirsh-
Pasek, Department of Psychology, Temple University, and ing memory (Gomes, Wolfson, & Halperin,
Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; Roberta Michnick 2007; Leonard et al., 2007).
Golinkoff, School of Education, University of Delaware. Language underpins much of what happens
Brenna Hassinger-Das and Tamara Spiewak Toub con- both in and out of school, and children who lack
tributed equally to this submission. The research reported
here was supported by the Institute of Education Sci-
sufficient language and world knowledge often
ences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grants struggle to keep up (Hoff, 2013). Though re-
R305A110128, R305A150435, and R305A110284 to Kathy search demonstrates that strong language skills
Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff. are essential for literacy and other areas, parents
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Brenna Hassinger-Das, Department of Psychol-
(Hart & Risley, 1995) and teachers (Dickinson,
ogy, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122. E-mail: 2011) often do not create sufficiently language-
[email protected] rich environments. Efforts to increase support
5
 6 HASSINGER-DAS, TOUB, HIRSH-PASEK, AND GOLINKOFF

for language skills in young children have met fering. Much of classroom time is spent on
with varied success. One potential reason is that direct instruction, often dominated by work-
differences in language growth based on socio- sheets, rote memorization, and drills of skills
economic status (SES) emerge well before chil- without the promotion of meaningful reflection
dren begin formal schooling. Hart and Risley’s and understanding (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff,
(1995) groundbreaking research found that chil- 2011). This problem applies to language devel-
dren from professional families heard, on aver- opment, among other domains. For example,
age, 48 million words addressed to them by the among teachers using a scripted literacy curricu-
age of 4, while children from low-income fam- lum, only 8% used high-quality language learning
ilies only heard 13 million. This disparity is strategies, while low-quality strategies were used
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

critical, because children use existing knowl- by 40% of teachers (Justice, Mashburn, Hamre, &
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

edge of words to help them learn new words. Pianta, 2008). High-quality strategies included the
Multiple researchers have found that this divide teacher asking many open-ended questions, re-
is not inherently due to SES, but rather to the peating or extending students’ responses, and us-
quality of communication young children expe- ing abstract vocabulary, among others. In contrast,
rience, even within a low-income sample (Cart- low-quality strategies included a majority of
mill et al., 2013; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015; close-ended questions, teacher-controlled conver-
McGillion et al., 2013). This huge variability in sations, and the infrequent use of advanced lan-
how often children are engaged in fluid and guage. In similar work, when Neuman and Dwyer
connected parent– child interactions at home (2009) reviewed how vocabulary is taught in pre-
puts children on an unequal footing even before school, they concluded that “strategies that intro-
they enter school doors. duce young children to new words and entice
High-quality interventions— both in and out them to engage in meaningful contexts through
of school—might at least partially remediate semantically related activities are much needed”
this language gap. Some efforts focus on im- (p. 384).
proving the home language environment (Sus- Across the board, whether in formal or infor-
kind et al., 2015); however, although about 80% mal learning situations, there is a strong need to
of preschool and school-age children’s waking identify actionable strategies to increase the lan-
time is spent outside of school, in homes and guage richness of children’s environments, and
communities, much of the existing intervention this is best accomplished by the translation of
work has focused predominantly on classroom knowledge from the languages sciences. In that
settings. Data suggest that language support vein, we have extracted six evidence-based
through caretakers in more formal settings, such principles of language development from the vast
as center-based childcare, can help to buffer literature on language learning (see Table 1).
against the impact of poor language input in the These six principles focus on frequency, interest,
home (Vernon-Feagans & Bratsch-Hines, contingency, meaningfulness, diversity, and reci-
2013). Current efforts in schools, however, have procity. Each principle is supported by the re-
been within a culture of high-stakes testing,
with teachers reporting “unintentional and pos-
sibly negative consequences” for what and how
Table 1
they are teaching in their classrooms (Sunder- Six Principles of Language Development
man, Tracey, Kim, & Orfield, 2004, p. 3). The
pressures have translated into decreases in play Principle Definition
time and increases in time spent preparing for or Frequency Children learn what they hear the most.
taking tests, even in kindergarten classrooms Interest Children learn words for things and
(Miller & Almon, 2009). events that interest them.
While attempting to raise scores on academic Contingency Interactive and responsive environments
build language learning.
measures, policies have insufficiently addressed Meaningfulness Children learn best in meaningful
children’s educational needs: test scores con- contexts.
tinue to reflect low international rankings for the Diversity Children need to hear diverse examples
United States (Organisation for Economic Co- of words and language structures.
operation and Development, 2012), and skills Reciprocity Vocabulary, grammatical, and narrative
development are reciprocal processes.
untapped by those measures may also be suf-
 SIX PRINCIPLES 7

search literature, and the six principles work in quality— of words they hear early in life (Hoff,
tandem, often overlapping with each other in real- 2006; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Even as
life scenarios. The principles are designed to apply young as 8 months old, infants start to learn
to all learners in some fashion—regardless of age, how to carve out words from the stream of
SES, English language learner status, or other speech in their environments. Through statisti-
factors— because the variables that influence cal learning, infants figure out the probability
learning and retention apply broadly. We have that syllables follow one another (Saffran, As-
presented the principles in academic circles (Har- lin, & Newport, 1996). When infants hear a
ris, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2011; Konishi, phrase like “prettybaby,” for example, over time
Kanero, Freeman, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, they can note that “pre” and “tty” are statisti-
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

2014) and have begun to use them to inform cally more likely to go together than “tty” and
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

curricular design (Dickinson et al., 2016; Hadley, “ba.” This helps them to extract word units.
Dickinson, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Nesbitt, Infants must hear a sufficient amount of lan-
2015; Hassinger-Das et al., 2015; Toub, Dore, et guage input to segment the speech stream; spe-
al., 2016; Toub, Hassinger-Das, Nesbitt, et al., cifically, infants’ ability to identify new words
2016; Weisberg et al., 2015). is related to the frequency of those words ap-
The Read–Play–Learn (RPL) project was a pearing in their environment (Hurtado, March-
series of studies funded by the Institute for man, & Fernald, 2008; Huttenlocher, Haight,
Education Sciences to promote vocabulary de- Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). Additionally,
velopment in low-income monolingual and bi- the more speech infants hear, the faster they can
lingual preschoolers, ages 3 to 5, in the South- process language (Fernald, Marchman, &
ern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United Weisleder, 2013; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013)
States (Dickinson et al., 2016; Hadley et al., and the more readily they can learn new words
2015; Toub, Hassinger-Das, Nesbitt, et al., (Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). For example, by
2016; Weisberg et al., 2015). RPL was the
the time a child has figured out the first few
initial testing ground for the application of our
words of a conversation, she might have missed
six principles to a real-world context. Our in-
the rest of the speaker’s sentence. Processing
tervention was informed by findings from the
speed differences of just hundreds of millisec-
previous research covered in this review, iden-
tifying the most effective methods for spurring onds impact language uptake. However, as Hart
language development. In the context of book and Risley (1995) showed, children hear vastly
readings, adults introduced children to new different amounts of language depending on
words by providing child-friendly definitions their socioeconomic background, and thus both
and meaningful gestures, pointing to relevant processing speed and word knowledge are neg-
pictures, and inviting children to say the words. atively affected for children from disadvantaged
Adults then facilitated play activities to further backgrounds (Fernald et al., 2013).
support word learning. In each phase of the Research with bilingual children shows that
project, children successfully learned the taught the frequency principle applies to both lan-
words. Here, after describing each of the six guages. One study (Place & Hoff, 2011) used a
principles, we use RPL as an example to illu- parental diary method to document the blocks of
minate how the rich body of language science time in which bilingual 2-year-old children
data can be applied to help “language-ize” home were exposed to English only, Spanish only, or
and classroom environments to improve lan- both English and Spanish. The researchers
guage learning trajectories for young children. found that children’s English vocabulary and
grammar scores correlated positively with the
Six Principles for Language Development proportion of English-only exposure and nega-
tively with the proportion of Spanish-only ex-
Frequency: Children Learn What They posure. The children’s Spanish language scores
Hear Most were also positively related to their Spanish-
only exposure and negatively related to their
Children’s vocabularies and their early lan- English-only exposure. These findings demon-
guage comprehension and verbal processing strate the importance of frequently exposing
speed are associated with the quantity—and children to each of the languages they are learn-
 8 HASSINGER-DAS, TOUB, HIRSH-PASEK, AND GOLINKOFF

ing, though time management is more compli- learned more target words than children for
cated when multiple languages are involved. whom the review was separate from the game.
Increasing the frequency of language expo- The research shows that introducing language
sure is a focus of many school-based interven- content through activities that spark children’s
tions. For example, Sénéchal (1997) found that interest leads to improved learning.
children did not make gains on receptive or
expressive vocabulary knowledge after words Contingency: Interactive and Responsive
were presented in one book reading, but chil- Environments Build Language Learning
dren did make gains after being exposed to
words through three readings. Thus, frequency Language development thrives when children
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

of repetition was predictive of vocabulary out- engage in exchanges with adults that are con-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

comes. Increasing the frequency of word expo- tingent and responsive to their nonverbal and
sure is one clear, actionable strategy that can be conversational attempts. Responsive parenting is
implemented easily to facilitate language devel- a potent predictor of children’s later language,
opment. cognitive, and social development (Shonkoff &
Phillips, 2000). Imagine that a toddler at the play-
Interest: Children Learn Words for Things ground points and says, “Slide!” His parent also
and Events That Interest Them points and replies, “Yes, that’s a slide! Remember
the waterslide you used at the pool yesterday?” In
Children make word-to-world mappings to this episode of joint attention, the parent’s re-
learn new words. Attending to the same inter- sponse is temporally and meaningfully contingent
esting action or event in the world as their on what the child just said. Research demonstrates
parent or caregiver—joint attention—is critical that this is a potent combination for language
for children’s language development (Adam- learning (McGillion et al., 2013). The role of
son, Bakeman, Deckner, & Nelson, 2014). Be- contingency for language development is well es-
ginning around 6 months of age, infants connect tablished in the literature (Cartmill et al., 2013;
objects to labels as a result of their mothers’ Goldin-Meadow, 2015; Tamis-LeMonda,
gestures to the objects (Matatyaho-Bullaro, Kuchirko, & Song, 2014). Contingent verbal and
Gogate, Mason, Cadavid, & Abdel-Mottaleb, nonverbal interactions between mothers and their
2014). Adults also often follow children’s inter- toddlers at 2 years of age accounted for 27% of the
ests by noticing what children are focused on and variance in children’s expressive vocabulary one
providing related commentary (Bloom, 1993). year later (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). These inter-
This is a good tactic, as very young children are actions predicted vocabulary over and above gen-
more likely to learn words for things that they find eral maternal sensitivity and mothers’ words per
interesting and perceptually salient (Hollich et al., minute.
2000). In fact, children learn better when their Research has also demonstrated the oppo-
parent follows their interest than when the parent site: when children are exposed to words in
tries to get the child to shift focus to the parent’s noncontingent contexts, they do not learn as
goal (Dunham & Dunham, 1995). effectively. Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu (2003), for
Shared activities—such as book reading— example, studied whether native English-
provide prime opportunities for adults to capi- speaking 9-month-olds would retain their ability
talize on children’s interest to support a learning to discriminate between Mandarin phonemes in
goal. For example, duration of book reading and the presence of a live model. Mandarin phonemes
joint attention between mothers and their were only retained through live social interaction;
9-month-olds significantly predicted children’s infants who had audio-only or TV exposure to the
word knowledge at 34 months of age (Farrant & same Mandarin speaker could no longer discrim-
Zubrick, 2012). Similarly, Hassinger-Das and inate between those phonemes. Similar findings
colleagues (2016) used book reading plus a are apparent in work by Roseberry, Hirsh-Pasek,
board game to study how a game affects 4-year- and Golinkoff (2014), who examined verb learn-
olds’ word learning. Although all children ex- ing with 24- to 30-month-old children in live
perienced two readings, a game, and an equal social interaction, socially contingent video, or
amount of word review, children who experi- noncontingent video conditions. Only the children
enced the review embedded in the board game in the live social interaction and socially contin-
 SIX PRINCIPLES 9

gent video conditions learned the new verbs. ported by evidence in the memory literature that
These results and those from the Kuhl et al. (2003) semantically meaningful contexts facilitate bet-
study suggest that socially contingent interactions ter comprehension and recall (Bransford &
are optimal for language learning. Johnson, 1972). In line with such reasoning,
Play offers a prime opportunity to build on when school-age children were presented with
contingent interactions for the purposes of lan- sets of sentences, children remembered them
guage learning, both in the classroom and in the better when they were part of a meaningful and
home. An especially good setting for vocabu- coherent narrative than when the same sen-
lary growth is guided play, which combines the tences were presented in an incoherent order
enjoyable nature of free play with adult support (Kapikian & Briscoe, 2012). Even without a
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

for a specific learning goal (Weisberg, Hirsh- narrative storyline, however, individual words
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

Pasek, Golinkoff, Kittredge, & Klahr, 2016). can be meaningfully related, such as through cat-
Back-and-forth interactions between adults and egories (e.g., Blue Jays and Robins are types of
children are easily incorporated into guided birds). Neuman, Newman, and Dwyer (2011)
play, with adults joining children and playing found that preschoolers successfully learned vo-
along. Similar play-inspired activities with con- cabulary through the World of Words intervention
tingent adult-child interactions are central to the program, and the authors attributed this suc-
Montessori educational approach, which has cess—at least partially—to teachers highlighting
been shown to be more effective than other the categorical relations between words. They also
approaches for content areas such as language presented preschoolers with a novel word and its
learning (Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006; Lillard, associated category, such as, “This is a vice. It’s a
2013). By harnessing the power of contingent tool,” and they found that children were able to
interactions, educators and parents alike can correctly answer questions about these new
support language development. words, such as “Can you use these to make
things?” Finding connections between new infor-
Meaningfulness: Children Learn Best in mation and prior knowledge supports the memory
Meaningful Contexts process (Brod, Werkle-Bergner, & Shing, 2013).
Meaningfulness can also arise when informa-
Much of what often happens in early child- tion is grounded in engaging activities. One
hood settings is based more on making things example is dialogic book reading, in which an
than on making meaning (Christakis, 2016). adult helps children link the story to their lives.
Christakis offers the example of the common Dialogic reading increases vocabulary and im-
arts and crafts activity around Thanksgiving in proves children’s narrative and question-asking
which preschoolers make a turkey figure out of skills (Zevenbergen, Whitehurst, & Zevenber-
a tracing of their hand. She argues that teachers gen, 2003) compared to book reading where this
could provide a more meaningful experience by does not occur. Dialogic reading treats children
instead examining turkey feathers, talking about not just as listeners but as participants in an
eggs, or having a farmer come to the class. In a interactive experience (Mol, Bus, de Jong, &
similar vein, presenting new vocabulary in a Smeets, 2008). Children are then “constructive”
way that involves highlighting connections be- learners who, with adult support, meaningfully
tween new words and concepts and vocabulary elaborate on the new information, improving
that children already have makes words mean- their language learning (Chi, 2009).
ingful for children. Without that sort of mean-
ingful connection, a new word is isolated and of Diversity: Children Need to Hear Diverse
less discernible value for communication. Many Examples of Words and Language
adults recall memorizing stand-alone tidbits of Structures
information that are quickly forgotten, such as
the arcane vocabulary words tested on the SAT. Vocabulary input to children can be de-
In contrast, deep and sustainable learning of- scribed in terms of the number of different
ten involves thinking about similarities, differ- words (“types”) and in terms of the total number
ences, or more abstract concepts relating to in- of words (“tokens”), including repetitions.
terconnected ideas (Hadley et al., 2015; Shuell, While the frequency principle acknowledges
1990). There is a compatible argument sup- benefits of experiencing multiple tokens of the
 10 HASSINGER-DAS, TOUB, HIRSH-PASEK, AND GOLINKOFF

same word, the diversity principle emphasizes Overall, the diversity principle recommends
that children do best when they are exposed to variability in vocabulary, speakers, and syntax.
a diverse array of word types. For example, data Research suggests that there are some activities
show that young children who heard a wider that tend to support more diverse language and
range of vocabulary from their mothers showed could be leveraged in applied settings. For ex-
faster growth in productive vocabulary than ample, a recent study by Montag, Jones, and
children whose mothers used fewer word types Smith (2015) examined vocabulary diversity in
(Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005). picture books and in natural child-directed
A second element of the diversity principle speech. After compiling a corpus of 100 picture
highlights the benefits of exposure to a varied books for use with neonates to 60-month-olds,
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

set of exemplars that are described by the same these researchers randomly sampled sections of
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

word. If “house,” for example, is only used to narrative to count the number of unique word
label a child’s own home, how would the child types in each book as well as in contiguous
learn that the neighbor has his house, too, and child-directed speech. Significantly more
that even birds have houses? Equipped with unique words were found in the picture books
different exemplars, children better understand than in the natural speech samples, suggesting
overarching concepts, such as inclusion and ex- that one possible strategy for increasing vocab-
clusion criteria that dictate category member- ulary diversity is to read age-appropriate books
ship (Perry, Samuelson, Malloy, & Schiffer, more often. Another practical way to apply the
2010), and they are less likely to misinterpret diversity principle is to increase the number of
words. native speakers to whom children are exposed.
The diversity principle is also reflected in the Different speakers will naturally utilize diverse
benefits children receive when exposed to dif- language structures, vocabulary, and exemplars.
ferent speakers of the same language. Data from
Reciprocity: Vocabulary, Grammatical, and
research with Spanish-English bilingual tod-
dlers, for example, illustrate that children who Narrative Development Are Reciprocal
are exposed to English through a larger number Processes
of conversational partners have greater English
While researchers often focus on only a sub-
language gains (Place & Hoff, 2011). When the set of language skills, such as vocabulary or
researchers looked at the percentage of native grammar, an important reality is that these ele-
English conversational partners during the pe- ments do not develop in a vacuum. Vocabulary
riods of time in which the toddlers were ex- and grammar development are concurrent and
posed to English only, that percentage was sig- reciprocally related processes (Dionne, Dale,
nificantly correlated with the toddlers’ English Boivin, & Plomin, 2003). For example, Brown
vocabulary scores. These findings suggest that it (1957) showed long ago that children could
may be the diversity of native speakers that is correctly identify a novel word as a verb or a
most beneficial for children’s vocabulary noun based on their understanding of its appear-
growth (Konishi et al., 2014; Place & Hoff, ance within a sentence and its grammatical mor-
2011). phemes, such as, “In this picture, you can see
Diversity can also be considered as variation sibbing” or “In this picture you can see a sib.”
in the syntactic context in which vocabulary Gleitman (1990) argued that humans often use
words are presented. Naigles (1996) found that sentential syntactic structure to help us under-
exposure to multiple syntactic frames facilitated stand new words, and this is called syntactic
young children’s verb learning; children saw a bootstrapping.
video depicting two actions and heard a novel Research shows that children as young as 2
verb first in one syntactic frame (e.g., “The duck years of age can use syntax not only to identify
is sebbing the frog”) and then in a different the part of speech of a new word but also to
syntactic frame (e.g., “The duck is sebbing,” or formulate a strong idea of what the word means
“The frog is sebbing”), and they interpreted the (Fisher, Klingler, & Song, 2006). This process
word differently based on the combination of was reflected in the data from Naigles (1996)
frames they heard. These findings relate to the described in the context of the diversity princi-
reciprocity principle, as described next. ple, as children interpreted the novel verb’s
 SIX PRINCIPLES 11

meaning based on the syntactical presentations conversations, the reciprocity principle is appar-
that they heard. Other data from Imai and col- ent—as are the other principles.
leagues (2008) show that novel verb-learning is
influenced specifically by children’s use of the
syntactical cues most typical in their native lan- Applying the Six Principles
guage. In particular, English-speaking 5-year-
The research is clear: The six principles of
olds performed better on a novel verb-learning
language development provide parents and ed-
and extension task when the novel verb was
ucators with an effective framework for sup-
accompanied by its arguments (i.e., “Look! She porting children’s learning. Prior intervention
is X-ing it!”), which is most common in Eng- projects have targeted similar evidence-based
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

lish. In contrast, their Japanese-speaking peers principles. For example, the World of Words
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

performed better when the arguments were intervention (Neuman et al., 2011) used taxo-
dropped (i.e., “Look! X-ing!”), which is more nomic categorization and multimedia tools in
typical in Japanese. The reverse relation of rec- ways that leverage principles of meaningfulness
iprocity between grammar and vocabulary is and diversity of modes of presentation. In a
also apparent in young children, as even 2- to more comprehensive example, Coyne, Sim-
3-year-old children use lexical bootstrapping by mons, Kame’enui, and Stoolmiller (2004) ex-
relying on their understanding of vocabulary plicitly cited a set of evidence-based principles
words to glean aspects of language structures as the rationale for their design of a shared
(Dionne et al., 2003). storybook intervention for kindergarteners, and
Supporting previous research (Dickinson & their list overlaps with many of the six princi-
Tabors, 2002), the Language and Reading Re- ples we present here. However, for their princi-
search Consortium (2015) recently addressed a ples, Coyne et al. (2004) specifically drew from
third dimension of language ability, besides vo- research on vocabulary instruction techniques
cabulary and grammar: discourse, which in- used with children in Grade 3 and above and
cludes comprehension of and ability to make research on storybook reading methods typi-
inferences from discourse or text, for example. cally used in prekindergarten through Grade 2.
They reported developmental changes such that In contrast, our group of six principles is drawn
the three constructs were undifferentiated in from a broader collection of language sciences
kindergarteners, but by the time children were 8 research. Prior to RPL, these principles had
years old, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse never before been used as the blueprint for
were three separate dimensions of language designing a preschool vocabulary intervention
(Language and Reading Research Consortium, that combined book reading and play-based ac-
2015). These findings are compatible with the tivities.
argument that elements of language are interre- Initial steps in RPL focused on the selection
lated but distinguishable constructs that develop of words to teach the preschoolers, with a goal
during childhood. of using diverse vocabulary from a range of
In practical settings, recognition of the recip- parts of speech. We deliberately chose words
rocal relations among aspects of language de- that were at least Level T2 (Biemiller, 2010)—
velopment can translate into efforts to encour- high-priority words that are typically known by
age children to leverage their knowledge in one advanced students by the end of second grade
domain to understand the other. When a new and not known by at-risk students. This decision
word is the only element of a given sentence ensured that children were unlikely to already
with which a child is unfamiliar, the child can know the words or learn them through other
use distributional information (e.g., where in the experiences during the study. RPL taught up to
sentence the new word appears), as well as 16 words per book, while other studies have
extralinguistic cues, to decipher the new word’s generally taught four to six words per book
meaning. Therefore, adults can present new vo- (Blewitt, Rump, Shealy, & Cook, 2009; Han,
cabulary words in meaningful sentences with Moore, Vukelich, & Buell, 2010). As noted by
varying syntactic structures to facilitate chil- Hadley and colleagues (2015), many interven-
dren’s understanding of a new word. When vo- tions do not even report the types of words
cabulary learning takes place within organic taught; however, our selected words were of
 12 HASSINGER-DAS, TOUB, HIRSH-PASEK, AND GOLINKOFF

varied form classes, such as nouns, verbs, ad- Additionally, guided play sessions, in partic-
jectives, and adverbs. ular, were expressly designed to build on chil-
During the RPL activities, children were ex- dren’s interests: the adult provided story-related
posed to each target word frequently—for ex- figurines, and the play often involved adult-
ample, a total of 12 times each, over the course scaffolded reenactment of the book’s story. Re-
of multiple weeks, in one phase of the project gardless of the theme of the play, the adult
(Toub, Hassinger-Das, Nesbitt, et al., 2016). would join in, following children’s lead. The
Those 12 occurrences were spread across dif- adult also found organic opportunities to weave
ferent contexts, including readings of the book, vocabulary review into what children were do-
picture vocabulary cards that showed pictures ing, often by reviewing word definitions and
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

unrelated to the story, and play with figurines, giving children opportunities to answer ques-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

with opportunities to answer comprehension tions about words. During these interactions,
questions. Undoubtedly, these episodes gave the adult could respond in ways that were mean-
children the opportunity to think more deeply ingful and both temporally and semantically
about the words and their relation to their own contingent on children’s conversational bids or
experiences. As children gained experience nonverbal actions.
with words in RPL, activities sometimes invited Importantly, it was not simply the additional
children to try to recall the words or meanings. adult-supported review that mattered; not all
Such retrieval practice may have also contrib- word review activities were equally effective, as
uted to children’s word learning (Karpicke & shown by results from a teacher-implemented
Roediger, 2008). The various contexts involv- phase of RPL (Toub, Hassinger-Das, Nesbitt, et
ing book reading, picture cards, and play also al., 2016). In that phase, after target words were
leveraged the reciprocity between vocabulary introduced in the book reading, teachers re-
and grammar, as the conversations included viewed only half of the target words through
various grammatical cues that could help foster guided play with children. Teachers reviewed
word learning. The contexts also helped to the other half of the target words through a less
make the words meaningful, whether due to the contingent teacher-led picture card activity. Al-
engaging activities in which they were embed- though real-world intervention research inher-
ded, the child-friendly definitions that incorpo- ently involves less precise experimental control,
rated words children already knew, or the dis- the two subsets of words were similarly diverse,
cussions of connections between words and were all taught through the same book reading
children’s lives. process, and were all reviewed with approxi-
Although much is known about the success of mately the same frequency. The key difference
shared book reading techniques—like dialogic was in the style of the word review. Our results
reading (Zevenbergen et al., 2003)—little is revealed that children were significantly better
known about the specific components of book at stating word meanings for the words that
reading approaches that are most effective for were reviewed through guided play than for
language learning. In the first phase of RPL, words reviewed in the picture card activity.
children took part in one of three reading con- Guided play better facilitated word learning
ditions: Recall, Conceptual, or Didactic (Dick- even though both activities featured retrieval
inson et al., 2016; Hassinger-Das et al., 2015). (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). These findings
In the Recall condition, no definitions were sup- align with the principles of meaningfulness,
plied, and children were prompted to use the contingency, and interest, because word learn-
new words during a follow-up discussion. In the ing was more effectively fostered when children
Conceptual and Didactic conditions, children took part in engaging activities in which they
were given explicit definitions and encouraged used and heard new words during contingent
to use the words three times: once during book interactions with adults and peers that built on
reading and twice during follow-up discussions. their own interests.
All three reading conditions demonstrated com- The reciprocity between facets of language
parable and significant vocabulary growth; as development was the focus of a part of RPL that
such, the three approaches were combined to measured children’s narrative abilities, in addi-
create the enriched book reading approach used tion to their vocabulary development. For the
in the later phases of RPL. narrative task, children completed an assess-
 SIX PRINCIPLES 13

ment that asked them to use their own words to the six principles. Importantly, the program’s
retell the stories from the stimulus books. Re- focus was on pedagogy, with techniques and
sults showed the reciprocity principle in action: strategies that we designed to transfer to other
children who experienced our play sessions books and play materials. Therefore, RPL re-
used more taught vocabulary words in their flects the promise of these techniques in real-
retellings than children who did not have play world application.
sessions but learned the words in other ways.
Thus, children who had reviewed the words Final Thoughts
during play were able to use their newly learned
words for the purposes of telling a story (Toub, Development of language skills is related to
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Hassinger-Das, Schroer, et al., 2016). other growth in the cognitive, social, and emo-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

In all of these ways, the design of RPL in- tional domains (Gomes et al., 2007; Hoff, 2013;
corporated the principles of frequency, interest, Leonard et al., 2007; Roben et al., 2013). From
contingency, meaningfulness, diversity, and rec- early childhood, language skills are crucial first
iprocity. Across the various phases, both mono- steps toward later spoken and written commu-
lingual children and children learning English as a nication. These communication skills are foun-
second language showed gains in vocabulary dational for acquisition of new facts and ideas in
taught through the reading and play activities. school, the workplace, hobbies, and personal
Overall, data show that children had significant relationships. Therefore, we must translate the
gains in receptive and expressive knowledge of science behind language development into prac-
the taught words, with medium to large effect tice in our interactions with children to best
sizes, depending on the phase of the research. In a equip them for these endeavors. The need for
teacher-implemented phase (Toub, Hassinger- additional support for language learning is es-
Das, Nesbitt, et al., 2016), for example, children pecially apparent in communities serving chil-
learned roughly five new target words per unit. dren from low-income families, given the lan-
This translates to a 15% increase in knowledge of guage (Hart & Risley, 1995) and other
the target words from pretest to posttest, which is achievement gaps (Jordan & Levine, 2009;
a greater percentage than in other studies with Raver, Blair, & Willoughby, 2013; Verdine et
book reading and play (Han et al., 2010; Roskos al., 2014). We have merely scratched the sur-
& Burnstein, 2011). In addition, children’s gains face of the theoretical and empirical literature to
on the taught words were greater than their gains date, but we distill this rich literature through
for words to which they were merely exposed our six principles: Children learn (a) what they
(from the book, but never discussed) or for control hear the most and (b) words for things that
words (never present). The effective features of interest them. They learn (c) through contingent
the RPL intervention were strong enough to affect and responsive interactions and (d) in contexts
learning even when we taught a relatively large in which the word is made meaningful for them.
number of new and quite challenging words. (e) Children need to hear diversity in the lan-
Lastly, the effect sizes we have observed in RPL guage addressed to them, and (f) vocabulary
are comparable to (and in some cases more prom- and grammatical development are among recip-
ising than) overall effects reported in meta- rocal processes of language development that
analyses of vocabulary-focused interventions can be utilized to facilitate one another.
(Marulis & Neuman, 2010; Mol, Bus, & de Jong, Part of the power of these interrelated prin-
2009; Shanahan & Lonigan, 2010). ciples lies in their practical implications for
In sum, focusing on vocabulary development, everyday life. Abstracted from the literature on
RPL employed the six principles of language language learning, the principles transform
development to improve language outcomes for complex data sets into “edible science”—
children. Each phase of the project also incor- digestible, accessible, and meaningful—for re-
porated specific design features that helped us to searchers, educators, and parents alike. Future
explore the elements of the intervention that research could examine the relative strength of
might contribute significantly to preschoolers’ each individual principle, to the extent that they
word learning. Therefore, the previously re- can be isolated; however, for the purposes of
ported results from the various phases shed ad- application, we can take advantage of the power
ditional light on the potential contributions of of the overlaps and interrelations among the
 14 HASSINGER-DAS, TOUB, HIRSH-PASEK, AND GOLINKOFF

principles to best support children’s language ers (e.g., parents, teachers, administrators) have
learning. Adults can implement principle-based been heavily embedded in the culture of a
strategies to make storybook time and playtime (false) play versus learning dichotomy (Hirsh-
both enjoyable and educational. Even interac- Pasek & Golinkoff, 2011).
tions outside of particular child-focused activi- To address some of these concerns in our
ties offer opportunities to support language current intervention work building on the RPL
learning. For example, a study was conducted in project, we are developing additional profes-
supermarkets to examine how shoppers’ con- sional development materials to express the un-
versations with their children were affected by derlying rationale behind our approach. We are
simple signs that were placed around the store also creating a wider variety of play-based tools
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

(Ridge, Weisberg, Ilgaz, Hirsh-Pasek, & from which teachers can choose for supporting
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

Golinkoff, 2015). These signs suggested con- vocabulary learning (Toub, Dore, et al., 2016).
versational prompts about relevant topics, such A similar approach could be taken to demon-
as different kinds of apples. After the signs were strate to parents and caregivers how to master-
placed, there was greater quantity and quality of fully weave together play and vocabulary learn-
talk between adult shoppers and their children. ing and to shift cultural beliefs among the
Such findings illustrate that opportunities for broader community members regarding the role
language support abound not just in classrooms, of play in learning. However, we are not sug-
but also in communities at large. RPL too, dem- gesting that there is only one way to reach
onstrates the efficacy of these principles in ac- parents and caregivers; disparate levels of liter-
tion. Focusing on vocabulary development, we acy and other factors do not make for an easy
used frequent exposures to diverse words within fix. Even so, stakeholder buy-in is essential,
meaningful sentences as well as contingent, given the limited resources available in both
playful interactions that built on children’s in- formal and informal educational settings. What
terest to teach new words. However, it is im- else has to shift within classroom settings to
portant to note that the RPL intervention is allow the time and space for these evidence-
simply a starting point. based techniques for language support? How
There are a variety of challenges communi- can communities help to support teachers in
ties will face as we work to translate the science making those shifts?
behind these six principles into practice. One As the science of learning further enhances
challenge for both researchers and caregivers our understanding of language development and
will be in identifying the conditions under these six principles, new insights will continue
which specific principle-based strategies are ef- to inform practice. Many aspects of these prin-
fective in both school settings and beyond. Even ciples are applicable to learning across domains.
in situations in which principle-based strategies For example, principles of meaningfulness, in-
are successful, insufficient training of teachers, terest, and contingency are reflected in the four
parents, and other stakeholders could be a bar- broad pillars of learning culled from the science
rier to effective implementation and scale-up. In of learning literature by Hirsh-Pasek and col-
RPL, classroom teachers often had difficulty leagues (2015): Children and adults learn best
juggling both the vocabulary review strategies (a) when they are active as opposed to passive,
and the guided play techniques we asked them (b) when they are engaged and not distracted,
to use during the play sessions (Toub et al., (c) when information is presented in a person-
2015). Some teachers were not comfortable ally meaningful way, and (d) when the learning
with or did not enjoy joining children in the play is socially interactive and contingent. Future
with figurines or adopting the role of a character research will help elucidate how the principles
and taking on the character’s voice. For some intersect with these broader pillars and poten-
teachers, such approaches are not only unfamil- tially also operate in different domains. In the
iar but also might conflict with their formal meantime, through conscious consideration of
training. A logistical barrier to implementing these six principles, educators, policymakers,
these techniques is the preparation time neces- parents, and other stakeholders can increase
sary to help teachers embrace them effectively. children’s language knowledge both in and out
Even with sufficient time, however, there might of school, which can have a domino effect on
also be well-intentioned resistance if stakehold- development in other domains.
 SIX PRINCIPLES 15

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