The Read lab is starting 2018 with rhyme on our minds! For the last few years we have been investigating how rhyming target words in stories, can help kids remember and learn those words better (see here) so this isn’t entirely new. Last year we also saw that kids could use rhyme to make their own predictions about what words to expect in a story, and we found that rhyme could help with even challenging verbs, too (two new papers forthcoming in 2018!). Now, the monster story is back in action and we’re diving deeper into how both rhyme *and* giving kids a chance to make predictions can help make new words extra sticky. Over the break 24 fun-loving 2- to 5-year-olds lent us their time and their listening ears to help us learn the monsters’ names in this new study, but we are still hoping another 25 will join us in the lab to get to the bottom of just how best we can take advantage of good rhymy stories to help expand our vocabularies. If you’d like to help out or learn more, let us know by emailing childresearch@scu.edu