Chapter 8: Vocabulary Learning by Computer in Kindergarten: The Possibilities of Interactive Vocabulary Books

Vocabulary knowledge is an important factor for school success; early differences in vocabulary knowledge appear to have a strong impact on such success (Baker, Simmons, & Kame’enui, 1998). Especially immigrant children often enter school with limited knowledge of the second language, and research by Verhoeven and Vermeer (1992, 2001, 2006), for example, has shown the Dutch vocabularies of immigrant children in the Netherlands (i.e., children learning Dutch as a second language) to be much smaller than those of native children. Moreover, this difference tends to increase during the elementary school years, a phenomenon referred to as the Matthew effect (Stanovich, 1986).