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Adults reading to preschool children have been encouraged to use print references (e.g., questions and comments about print) to stimulate children's interactions with written language. This study used sequential analysis (Bakeman & Gottman, 1997) to determine the extent to which typically developing preschoolers were responsive to parental print references during a shared book-reading interaction using a rhyming book. Participants included 15 parents and their preschool children (mean age = 4 years 6 months). A single shared reading ession was collected for each dyad following parental instruction in print-referencing behaviors. Results indicated that children responded at an overall rate of 60% to parental print references but that differential levels of child responsiveness occurred as a function of parental utterance type. That is, parental prompts were significantly more likely to elicit child responses than parental comments were. Results also indicated that children's responsiveness did not vary as a function of the early literacy topic of parental print references. For instance, children were no more likely to respond to prompts addressing alphabet knowledge than those addressing book-reading concepts or word awareness. Results may help guide intervention planning for children exhibiting low levels of early literacy skill.
Justice et al. (Fri,) studied this question.