This just in! A new academic paper from the Read Lab went to print last week (see here ) in the peer reviewed journal Cognitive Development describing the results of a study we started 3 years ago (yes, some of our research volunteers are already in first grade!). In the paper we describe a phenomenon that many parents and preschool teachers may already be aware of – when you read a child a little rhyme but leave off the last word, kids are pretty good at filling it in for you.

Imagine reading these lines from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Thinks You Can Think to a 3- or 4-year-old :

“You can think up some colors / That’s what you can do / You can think about yellow / Or think about…”  

Most kids will jump at the chance to shout out BLUE!  even if they can’t tell you why.

In our paper we document this ability of children to use rhyme to make word predictions (even when they don’t know what rhyme actually is), and discuss how important that ability might be for picking up words from storybook reading (since so many stories rhyme).

Who knew vocabulary building could be so interactive and fun 😉   (hee, hee, we did!)