AIRS 1st Annual Meeting: 2009 Title: Learning and Singing: Song Intervention to Enhance Preschool Vocabulary Authors: Jennifer Sullivan (St. Francis Xavier University), Abstract This research will explore the value of singing for teaching non-musical content, specifically, vocabulary. Previous research has found that young school-ages children vary substantially in the number of words they can comprehend (e.g., see Anglin, 1993). Those children with smaller vocabulary comprehension are usually found to have more academic difficulty throughout their school years (Stanovich, 1986). Several researchers have implemented various strategies to enhance vocabulary knowledge in pre-school (Senechal & Cornell, 1993), primarily (Biemiller & Boote, 2006), and older elementary school-aged children (Beck & McKeown, 2007). Very little research has been conducted investigating the use of song to enhance vocabulary comprehension. In this study, preschool children, who are 3- and 4- years old, will participate in a singing intervention program in their daycare setting. The children will learn to sing short nursery songs that contain advanced vocabulary words. This group will be compared to a storybook reading group. General vocabulary measures, as well as measures of target vocabulary comprehension, will be taken both before and after the interventions. We anticipate that this study will help show the value of singing for enlarging vocabulary.