Text Mining of Evidence on Infants’ Developmental Stages for Developmental Order Acquisition from Picture Book Reviews

Text Mining of Evidence on Infants’ Developmental Stages for Developmental Order Acquisition from Picture Book Reviews Miho Kasamatsu1 Takehito Utsuro1 Yu Saito2 Yumiko Ishikawa3 1Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, 305-8573, JAPAN 2Faculty of Child Studies, Seitoku University, Matsudo, 271-8555, JAPAN 3Cooperative Faculty of Education, Utsunomiya University, Utsunomiya, 321-8505, JAPAN Abstract Herein, we study infants’ reactions associated with the ordering of development mediated by picture books. We propose an approach that detects evidence on infants’ reaction types from reviews of picture books. Existing devel- opmental psychology research reports that in- fants’ development occurs in a specific order; i.e., infants react according to their develop- mental stages. These existing findings must be extended because limited literature exists on studying picture books and infants’ develop- mental order. However, the conventional ap- proach in developmental psychology is time- and labor-consuming. Furthermore, existing findings show no information on the charac- teristics of picture books, making it harder to reproduce existing findings. To solve this problem, we collect infants’ reactions by ex- tracting the descriptions of infants’ reactions from online reviews of picture books. Addi- tionally, we investigate the characteristics of picture books that are related to these infants’ developmental reactions. We collect over 150 reactions for each of the four types of reac- tions selected for the analysis and obtain typ- ical characteristics of picture books for three reactions among the four types of selected re- actions and find the proposed approach based on text mining of picture book reviews to be highly effective. 1 Introduction Typically, educational books focus on specific sub- jects to be voluntarily learned such as science and sociology. However, picture books differ in the sense that because they are efficient in infants’ cog- nitive development (Pardeck, 1986). They do not fo- cus on specific educational subjects with their style of expressions, i.e., funny stories and pictures. Al- though the readers of picture books are parents or childcare personnel who read the books for infants who have yet to achieve literacy. The target audience comprises infants who perceive and interpret the in- coming stimuli of the book being read to them and the pictures shown in the books. Thus, picture books differ from other educational books in the sense that those who read them are separated from those who perceive them. Developmental psychology research states that infants exhibit various cognitive reactions external stimuli based on their developmentalto stage (Sully, 2000; Piaget, 1962; Leslie, 1987; Walker-Andrews and Kahana-Kalman, 1999). In- fants express such cognitive reactions when picture books act as the stimuli. Furthermore, considering that infants cannot understand the printed letters of picture books, this tendency of reacting to pictures might be amplified to a certain extent. Herein, we investigate infants’ reactions related to the ordering of development mediated by picture books. We propose an approach that detects evi- dence on infants’ reaction types by applying the text mining technique. In this area of research, existing research on developmental psychology (Ishikawa and Maekawa, 1996) has reported …

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