Parent-infant Learning Dynamics During Early Shared Book Reading

Shared book reading has been found to have broad developmental benefits for language, socio-emotional and cognitive development. However, the effects of shared book reading on infant development are not well understood. Although healthcare professionals and educators ask parents to read books to their infants early and often, the book reading experience itself has never been systematically investigated in infancy. This work is guided by two specific aims and is expected to result in a better understanding of the effectiveness of shared book reading as a tool for supporting parent-infant interactions and infant learning across the first year of life. The primary aim of the proposed work is to determine the extent to which books with individually-named characters (e.g., "Boris", "Fiona") increases parent-infant joint attention and infant selective attention relative to books with generic labels (e.g., "Bear", "Bear") or no labels and whether attention differs by age. To address the aim of this project, a cross-sectional sample of 6-, 9-, and 12-month old infants and their parents came to the laboratory and read a book that includes three distinct character labeling conditions (individual names, generic category labels, no label). During infant-parent shared book reading joint attention was measured using dual eye-tracking. Infants and parents then returned to the lab the next day and infant selective attention and infant-parent neural synchrony was measured using EEG frequency tagging while infants and their parent viewed familiar characters across labeling conditions as well as unfamiliar characters. This project determined the extent to which parent-infant shared book reading impacted infant attention, parent-infant joint attention, EEG power, and parent-infant EEG synchrony.