A story about a word: does narrative presentation promote learning of a spatial preposition in German two-year-olds?

We trained forty German-speaking children aged 1;8–2;0 in their comprehension of UNTER [UNDER]. The target word was presented within semantically organized input in the form of a ‘narrative’ to the experimental group and within ‘unconnected speech’ to the control group. We tested children’s learning by asking them to perform an UNDER-relation before, immediately after, and again one day after the training using familiarized and unfamiliarized materials. Compared to controls, the experimental group learned better and retained more. Children with advanced expressive lexicons in particular were aided in generalizing to unfamiliarized materials by the narrative presentation. This study extends our understanding of how narrations scaffold young children’s enrichment of nascent word knowledge.