Research Findings: In this study, we examined the short- and long-term effects of Reading Express, a home-visiting intervention in which volunteers encourage low socio-economic status and ethnic minority parents to engage in interactive shared reading with their child. Outcomes of a quasi-experiment involving 176 children in the Netherlands (mean…

This study investigated the effect of traditional interactive reading and interactive reading using mindmaps on children's language competence and their story comprehension and causal reasoning. Furthermore, we explored teachers' dialogic scaffolding in the two approaches and investigated the relation between teachers' dialogic scaffolding and…

The emotional availability scales (EAS), 4th edition, are widely used in research and clinical practice to assess the quality of parent-child interaction. This study examined the short-term reliability and continuity of the EAS (4th ed.) assessed in two similar observational contexts over a one-week interval. Sixty-two Dutch parents (85% mothers)…

The ability to deduce implicit information about relations in a text (i.e., inferencing) is essential to understanding that text. Hence, there is increasing attention for supporting inferencing skills among children in early literacy programs including shared book reading interventions. This study investigated whether embedding scripted…

Research Findings: The present study compared effects of explicit instruction on and practice with the phonological form of words (form-focused instruction) versus explicit instruction on and practice with the meaning of words (meaning-focused instruction). Instruction was given via interactive storybook reading in the kindergarten classroom of…

Language ability plays a major role in children's future development. In the present study, the effect of three interactive reading approaches on children's language ability was investigated through a pre-posttest design. Participants were N = 73 children (aged 4-6) from three early childhood education classrooms. Classrooms were assigned to one…

The purpose of this study was to examine the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension in the upper grades of primary school. We compared 3 theoretical possibilities: Two unidirectional relations from text reading prosody to reading comprehension and from reading comprehension to text reading prosody…

We investigated effects of listening to single or multiple storybook readings versus testing with and without feedback on children's breadth (i.e., the number of words) and depth (i.e., the quality of word knowledge) of vocabulary learning. Kindergartners (n = 125) were divided into 3 intervention and 1 control conditions. Children in the control…

Introduction: Multi-sensory storytelling (MSST) is a storytelling method designed for individuals with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD). It is essential that listeners be alert during MSST, so that they become familiar with their personalised stories. Repetition and the presentation of stimuli are likely to affect the…

A dialogic storybook-based intervention integrating dialogic storybook reading with early literacy activities is studied with a longitudinal quasi-experimental study design. The effects of this intervention, in addition to a regular early childhood education (ECE) program, on kindergartners' vocabulary and phonological awareness development are…

We investigated the sustained effects of explicit versus implicit instruction on the breadth and depth of children's vocabularies, while taking their general vocabulary and verbal short-term memory into account. Two experimental groups with 12 and 15 kindergarten children respectively learned two sets of 17 words counterbalanced to be taught first…

Novel word learning is reported to be problematic for children with severe language impairments (SLI). In this study, we tested electronic storybooks as a tool to support vocabulary acquisition in SLI children. In Experiment 1, 29 kindergarten SLI children heard four e-books each four times: (a) two stories were presented as video books with…

In the current study we investigated word, pseudoword and story reading in Dutch speaking braille and print readers. To examine developmental patterns, these reading skills were assessed in both children and adults. The results reveal that braille readers read less accurately and fast than print readers. While item length has no impact on word…

This study attempts to reliably measure literature reading and creative writing ability, and subsequently to determine whether a relationship exists between the two abilities. Participants were 19 eleventh-grade students: 11 were known to be good readers of literature, whereas 8 were known to be poor readers of literature. Each participant read 4…

Background: Various aspects of the home literacy environment are considered to stimulate the emergent literacy development in children without disabilities. It is important to gain insight into the home literacy environment of children with cerebral palsy given that they have been shown to have difficulty acquiring literacy skills. Aims: The aims…