Examines interactions between 48 mothers and their two- , three-and-a-half-, and five-year-old children during book reading sessions. Formal reading and interchange about story content increased with age and book familiarity, while labelling decreased with age and book familiarity. (RJC)

The confounding of chronological and educational age and of schooling and socioeconomic status are persistent problems in the study of the cognitive consequences of schooling. The educational system among the Kharwar in India provides a natural experiment to overcome these problems, since it shows neither source of confounding. The sample…