Research Symposium

BIO

Ana De Freitas is a second-year student at Florida State University from Orlando, Florida, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Nursing with an expected graduation of Spring 2027. As a first-generation college student, she is passionate about expanding access and opportunity in healthcare. Ana is currently conducting research under the mentorship of Rebecca Vasile, exploring how narrative and informational texts differ in vocabulary and language features in preschool classrooms. She is passionate about working with children and plans to pursue a career as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner after graduation.

Text and Word Level Differences in Children's Books by Genre​

Abstract

Research by Green and Keogh (2024) shows that narrative and informational texts expose children to different vocabulary and language patterns. However, limited research examines how these genres differ in text and word-level features such as frequency in child-directed speech, age of acquisition, and concreteness. Our research question asks: How do narrative and informational texts differ in their text and word-level features? Understanding these differences is important because children need balanced exposure to both genres to develop strong literacy skills.
We used corpus-based methods to analyze 447 books from 86 preschool classrooms in the southeastern United States, including 264 narrative and 171 informational texts. Genre coding was completed using an adapted coding scheme (Pentimonti et al., 2018) by two graduate students. Each book was transcribed to compare features including frequency in child-directed speech, question use, length of utterance, concreteness, and number of phonemes. Our preliminary results show clear differences between genres. Narrative texts use words more common in everyday child speech, while informational texts contain words more typical of adult writing. Only 26% of unique words appeared in both text types. Narrative texts also contained more questions than informational texts. These findings indicate meaningful variability in the language children encounter across genres.
These results suggest that early childhood educators should intentionally provide children with both narrative and informational texts to create balanced language learning experiences.

Keywords: Early childhood literacy, Vocabulary development, Children's literature