Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before…

Reading a book aloud with an adult, or shared book reading (SBR), is a key aspect of children's early experiences with literacy and one that can vary based on social and cultural factors. Based on a sample of 30 Mexican and Dominican families from the New York metro area, the present study investigated book reading strategies used by parents of…

The study adopts a multimodal perspective, looking at adults' use of gestures in variation sets (VS; i.e. sequences of partial self-repetitions occurring in successive utterances of varying form) addressed to Spanish-learning toddlers in adult-child interactions. We seek to address the following question: Do adults make simultaneous use of VS and…

Telepractice offers speech-language pathologists (SLPs) increased flexibility to support language development, including emergent literacy in clients with complex communication needs. However, clinicians may feel uncertain how to pair books with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) over telepractice. Following an overview of…

Social Stories™ are a story-based intervention commonly used to teach students with disabilities how to behave in new routines or changing environments, academic skills, and social interactions including tacting others' emotions. According to the National Standards Project, story-based interventions are considered an established treatment.…

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…

Background: Prior research has described the prevalence and utility of questions in children's language learning environment. However, there has been little empirical investigation of the interaction sequences that ensue following caregiver questions. Understanding these interactions may be especially important for children with autism spectrum…

Whereas previous studies show that children are able to make meaning about evolutionary concepts within read-aloud contexts, little is known about how semiotic resources and interaction influence children's meaning making about evolution. This study investigates children's meaning making about evolutionary concepts during a modelling activity…

Research Findings: Reading e-books is becoming common even among toddlers, but we have limited understanding of how parents-toddlers reading e-books together compares to print books. To address the gap, we investigated interactions of 30 mother-toddler (12 months) dyads, in particular, mothers' language use, while reading both electronic and print…

In this Teaching Tips article, we discuss our efforts to create and utilize translanguaging interactive read-aloud videos as part of a community-wide reading program focused on the reading and discussing of a shared book. Offering translanguaging spaces for bilingual readers in area elementary classrooms and the community, these videos were…

We describe a study of the internet-based Parent-Implemented Communication Strategies--Storybook (i-PiCSS), an intervention designed to train and coach parents to use evidenced-based naturalistic communication teaching (NCT) strategies (i.e., modeling, mand-model, and time delay) and RTs while reading storybooks with their young children with…

Previous studies have often compared and contrasted differences among media presentations, including traditional storybooks and videos and their potential for incidental word learning among preschoolers. Studies have shown that children learn words from a variety of media, and that repetition is an important source for incidental learning. Yet, to…

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)…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

Dialogic reading during shared book reading between adults and children is an effective way to promote vocabulary acquisition. However, there is limited research on what strategies parents are spontaneously using during book reading sessions, which are important to understand for optimizing parent training in dialogic reading. The current study…