Many theorists currently surmise that preschool children gain key elements of emergent literacy knowledge within the adult-child shared storybook reading context, specifically an awareness of written language. Applied researchers have showed that the shared reading context is particularly amenable to conducting interventions that accelerate preschoolers' emergent literacy knowledge across a variety of domains, with a salient strategy being the adults' use of references to print. The objective of the proposed study is to inform these areas of theory and practice by characterizing the nature of and influences upon 4-year-old children's visual attention to print during adult-child shared storybook reading. The study will use eye-gaze analysis to address the following specific aims: (a) To determine the extent to which preschool children visually attend to print during adult-child storybook reading, (b) To compare the relative influence of adult verbal picture cues versus print cues upon preschool children's visual attention to print, and (c) To compare the relative influence of two different types of print scaffolds, verbal print cues and nonverbal print cues, upon preschool children's visual attention to print. Sixty 4-year-old children will participate; a within-subjects design will serve as the framework. Each child will participate in four different conditions of adult-child storybook reading, during which eye-gaze patterns will be analyzed using the Eye-Gaze Response Interface Computer Aid (ERICA). The four conditions include verbatim (adult reads storybook verbatim), verbal picture focus (adult embeds questions and comments about pictures), verbal print focus (adult embeds questions and comments about print), and nonverbal print focus (adult points to print and tracks the print). For each condition, ERICA will be used to calculate the number of visual fixations on print as well as the time spent looking at print. These two dependent variables (number of print fixations, time spent in print zones) will be analyzed across the four conditions for each child to characterize the extent to which children visually attend to print during shared storybook reading, as well as the relative influence of various adult scaffolding strategies (i.e., questions and comments about pictures versus print, verbal versus nonverbal print cues) upon children's visual attention to print in this early literacy context.
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