AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THE ORGANIZATION OF PARENT-INFANT INTERACTIONS DURING PICTURE-BOOK READING

These observations indicate how the organization of book reading event s differs when middle- to upper-class suburban parents read picture bo oks to preverbal and verbal infants. Twelve parent-infant dyads for ea ch group of 9-, 17-, and 27-month-old infants were videotaped in their homes. On each of three visits, two different books were read. The bo oks either contained sentences describing the illustrations or did not contain any sentences. The quality of parent verbalizations changed w ith the age of the infant; parents reading to younger infants used mor e attention-recruiting verbalizations and more elaborations, whereas p arents reading to older infants used more questions and more feedback. Analyses of sequential dependencies between categories of behaviors s uggest that, across these age groups, parents monitor and attempt to m aximize their infants' attention to the book. Parents' verbalizations expand from labeling comments, to sequences of labeling questions, to dialogues that exercise the growing linguistic competencies of the inf ant. Finally, interactions with books containing no sentences led to m ore verbal behaviors by the parent and more vocalizations by the infan t.