1
Research Exploration: Childhood Assignment
Taylor Whitaker
School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University
PSYC 210: Developmental Psychology
Professor Deneen
November 20, 2023
2
Why Was This Article Written
This article was written to stress the importance of at-home, adult-child shared book reading. The
importance of reading at an early age is to expand vocabulary in preparation for kindergarten.
(Logan, et al., 2019) The authors of the article calculate the average number of words read to a
child based on the most popular childrens’ books and answers from the survey The Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort. The information is then used to further urge the
importance of reading in the first 5 years of a child’s life.
What is the Main Idea of this Article
The main idea of the article is that at-home, adult-child shared reading is exceedingly beneficial
and helpful in preparing a child for kindergarten. The results of the study emphasized the
difference of approximate vocabulary size between a child who is reportedly never read to and a
child who is read to multiple times a day. The difference is over 1 million, hence The Million
Word Gap (Logan, et al., 2019). In the discussion, the results were compared to the quantity of
