The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has deleterious effects on children. Our research observed mothers' conversations with their 5-7-year-old children about the conflict during shared book reading (SBR) of a fiction book, indirectly depicting the conflict. Using a mixed-methods study, we compared the SBR of secular and religious Israeli Jewish…

This research explored children's attitudes towards gossipers in relation to gossip valence. Four- to 8-year-old children (N = 214) read three storybooks containing positive, neutral, or negative gossip statements. Following each book, children were interviewed on whom they viewed as nicer and more honest (ascription of desirable traits), whom…

Two experiments tested how the number of illustrations in storybooks influences 3.5-year-old children's word learning from shared reading. In Experiment 1, children encountered stories with two regular-sized A4 illustrations, one regular-sized A4 illustration, or one large-sized A3 illustration (in the control group) per spread. Children learned…

Research (Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005) suggests systematic patterns in how young children visually attend to storybooks. However, these studies have not addressed whether visual attention is predictive of children's storybook comprehension. In the current study, we used eye-tracking methodology to examine two-year-olds' visual attention while…

Caregivers' narrative elaborations have been consistently shown to relate to language, literacy, and cognitive skills in children. However, research with Latinos yields mixed findings in terms of how much caregivers elaborate and the benefits of elaborations for Latino children's development, especially within booksharing contexts. Moreover,…

This study examined associations among low-income mothers' use of attention-getting utterances during shared book reading, preschoolers' verbal engagement and visual attention to reading, and their early literacy skills (N = 51). Mother-child shared book reading sessions were videotaped and coded for each utterance, including attention talk,…

This paper examines the relationships among the quality and quantity of parent-child shared book reading (SBR) engagements and children's reading and mathematics outcomes in preschool. Additionally, we explore how child and family characteristics predict the quality and quantity of SBR. Quantity was measured using parental reports of the frequency…