Text analysis approach to measuring text social information in children’s picture books

ABSTRACT Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic differences. The purpose of this study was to develop an automated text analysis approach to measure text social information in children’s picture books beyond genre. Studies 1 and 2 found convergent and divergent validity for several measures that captured text social information with these measures being significantly higher in children’s fiction compared to nonfiction books and not correlated with other structural and linguistic text measures. Study 3 found two components of text social information, based on a principal component analysis. These two components captured a general socialness factor (i.e., theory of mind, emotions, and social relationships) and pragmatics/conversation. Study 4 provides preliminary evidence for the predictive validity of the text social information measures. Together, this study provides an initial set of continuous measures for measuring text social information that can begin to advance the field in determining how text social information impacts comprehension and social cognition.