Shared picture‐book reading: A sequential analysis of adult‐child verbal interactions

The purpose of this study was to determine whether adults and children influence each other's representations of objects or events during joint picture‐book reading. It was hypothesized that each partner adjusts his or her point of view on objects in order to share knowledge about pictures in the book. Seventeen adult/3‐year‐old child dyads were filmed during a reading session in a day‐care centre. Sequences of child‐adult and adult‐child utterances were considered within exchanges on a common topic and were classified according to the level of abstraction conveyed. A novel Bayesian method for the analysis of directional dependencies revealed that the level of abstraction a partner adopts depends on the level that the other partner has just expressed. A constant reciprocal adaptation is attested by the overrepresentation of sequences of partners’ utterances belonging to the same level. Moreover, adults raise the level of abstraction more often than children, creating a ‘zone of proximal development’. Adults thus appear to stimulate the child's representational abilities since the child is found to follow the adult when the latter changes the level of abstraction.