Purpose: The present study investigated whether the number of syllables affects developing readers' word recognition when controlling for word length and word frequency and, if so, whether the effect is dependent on reading fluency. The target language was Finnish, a language with a transparent orthography and a simple syllable structure. Method:…

Research Findings: Early childhood educators play an important role in promoting children's social emotional learning (SEL). This study proposes a comprehensive coding scheme to explore teachers' strategies and children's responses in shared book reading (SBR), which create opportunities to share pictures and storylines to examine social…

This study aimed to determine which types of context clues exist in children's texts and whether it is possible for experts to identify reliably those clues. Three experienced coders used Ames' clue set as a foundation for a system to classify context clues in children's text. Findings showed that the adjustments to Ames' system resulted in 15…

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,…

Research into the effect of questions asked during storybook reading in preschool settings has rarely investigated questions that elicit higher order thinking. In the current study, Blank et al.'s Four Levels of Abstraction were used to code teacher questions and child responses from 177 individual storybook reading sessions with eight…

Research Findings: Shared book reading provides opportunities for adults to engage in literacy-related interactions with children in meaningful ways. Research has examined various dimensions of adult and child behavior during shared book-reading interactions with some focus on how book type affects the reading experience. Little research, however,…

In a sample of 128 Canadian junior kindergarten children (66 boys), we examined sex differences in emergent literacy and behaviour when listening to and interacting with books of four types: alphabet books with simple text and illustrations, traditional alphabet books with complex text and illustrations, alphabet eBooks, and illustrated…

Verbal interaction with others has been identified as an important forum for children's developing understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others -- their theory of mind. However, conversational interactions in settings and relationships important to young children beyond the home and family have received little attention in research…

In this article, the authors show how groups of 2nd- and 4th-grade students in an urban school district responded to a postmodern children's book, The "Three Pigs" by David Wiesner (2001). The students came to the project from basal-based direct instruction, and here they were offered a more constructivist opportunity to engage with a…

This study examined the relation between exposure to shared book reading and Spanish-speaking English learners' (ELs'; n = 102) narrative production and comprehension skills in kindergarten (mean age = 6.12 years). Audio- and videotaped book-reading sessions in Spanish were coded in terms of teachers' extratextual talk and gestures. Using a silent…

The present study investigated how Chinese children develop theory of mind (ToM) in a language environment with limited mental state talk that is rich in behavior discourse. In Study 1, 60 mothers shared a wordless storybook with their 3-4-year-olds. The children completed two false-belief tasks and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised at…