The Effects of Frequency of Picture Presentation on Learning to Read in Young Children

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effects of frequency of picture presentation on young children's learning to read. The subjects were 132 children whose average age was 5: 7. 0n the basis of the age, the male-to-female ratio, and the number of hiragana and katakana letters they could read, they were assigned to one of the following six groups: high familiarity words - no picture presentation, high familiarity words - picture presentation twice, high familiarity words - picture presentation eight times, low familiarity words - no picture presentation, low familiarity words - picture presentation twice, and low familiarity words - picture presentation eight times. Each subject was taught to read two artificial words (four artificial scripts) for eight trials by a study-test method. For the scripts in the words the performance in the no picture groups and picture presentation twice groups was better than that in the picture presentation eight times groups. For the scripts in the words there was no significant difference between the no picture presentation groups and picture presentation twice groups, but for the scripts in the words with low familiarity the performance in the picture presentation twice groups was better than that in other groups. The finding suggests that pictures have a facilitating effects on learning to read words with low familiarity