Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

Dialogic reading (DR) is an intervention that aims to further students' expressive language development (Flynn, 2011; Towson et al., 2017). Specifically, DR occurs in small groups to afford students the opportunity to engage in active discussion and uses the same book for multiple readings and retellings. Because multiple research studies have…

This study examined variability of the home literacy environment (HLE) using multiple measures among families of low SES. The relations of the measures to each other and to children's early oral language skills and print knowledge were reported. Considerable variability of the self-reported HLE items and the Children's Title Checklist (CTC) but…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often demonstrate delays in early language and literacy skills. Shared reading, the practice of adults reading aloud to children while using behaviors (e.g., asking questions) that are meant to promote interaction between the adult and child, is an intervention that has had positive effects on those…

Focusing on 84 Chinese-English dual language learners (DLLs) in U.S. preschool programs serving children from low-income backgrounds, this study investigated which aspects of the home language and literacy environment and which parenting styles may be related to these DLLs' oral receptive and expressive language abilities in Chinese and English.…

This study described the commenting practices of Head Start teachers, and the relationship of comments to the expressive and receptive vocabulary growth of children with below-the-mean language ability across one year of preschool. Participants included 52 Head Start teachers, and 489 children (247 early intervention candidates and 242 Head Start…

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…

In this collective case study of caregiver behaviors with their toddlers, two-minute videotaped reading interactions were analyzed using a constant comparative method. Twenty-four caregiver-toddler dyads from a high-risk sample of children prenatally exposed to cocaine were selected from a larger sample because they represented the extremes of…

Data from two-year-old children and mothers were collected concerning age at which she began to read to child, frequency of home reading, number of stories read per week, frequency of visits by child to library. Picture-book reading exposure was more strongly related to receptive than expressive language. Age of onset of home reading routines was…