Although it is well established that reading with young children supports early language and literacy development, few studies have focused on the importance of parental beliefs about reading with infants. The current study, which sheds light on parental beliefs had three main aims. The first was to examine practices of shared reading in infancy…

This study explored longitudinal associations between early shared reading at 2 to 3 years of age and children's later academic achievement. It examined the mediating role of children's vocabulary and early academic skills, and the moderating effects of family's socioeconomic status. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Australian…

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…

Research Findings: This study examines the amount of attention to print paid by Taiwanese mothers and children during joint book reading over time and the relationship between the use of print referencing by Taiwanese mothers and the print concepts skills of their children measured at age 3;0. A total of 42 Taiwanese mother-child pairs from…

Research Findings: I examined the long-term association between the lexical and acoustic features of maternal utterances during book reading and the language skills of infants and children. Maternal utterances were collected from 22 mother-child dyads in picture book-reading episodes when children were ages 6-12 months and 5 years. Two aspects of…

The present study describes preschool read-alouds in terms of the types of texts to which children are exposed. The methods involved analyzing the genre and instructional foci of 426 titles read by 13 teachers throughout an entire academic year. Additionally, associations between teacher characteristics and texts teachers read in their classrooms…

This study investigated the relationship between picture book reading and 15-­month-­old toddlers' behaviors with photographs and books. During a pretest, 15-­month-­olds were presented with one photograph every 15 seconds (i.e., eight photographs in total). Immediately after the pretest, toddlers and their teachers read several short picture…