Collecting and Categorizing Infants’ Developmental Reactions in Reviews on Picture Books and Classifying Picture Books

Abstract

In order to examine how the stimuli of picture books induces a variety of reactions in infants, we take an approach of applying a text mining technique to a large amount of the reviews on picture books written by their parents or the childcare personnel. This paper especially studies the relation between the contents of picture books and an infant’s developmental reactions. We further classify subcategories of an infant’s developmental reactions as well as picture books according to the contents of picture books, and compare them with examples of infants’ developmental reactions reported in the developmental psychology literature. We conclude that the proposed approach of applying a text mining technique to the reviews on picture books is quite effective.