Caregiver prosody during shared reading: associations with preschoolers’ language skills and caregiver attributes in monolingual and bilingual families
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Abstract
Converging literature emphasizes shared reading as one of the most language-rich contexts in children’s home environments. A salient, understudied characteristic of shared reading is caregiver oral reading prosody. While caregiver prosody in child directed speech is linked to children’s emerging language skills, it remains unclear whether oral reading prosody during shared reading similarly relates to children’s early language development. Therefore, this dissertation investigated associations between caregiver oral reading prosody and preschool-age children’s language skills. Moreover, caregiver attributes, including reading skills and bilingual relative language dominance, were examined in this context. Studies 1 and 2 examined these relationships among a cohort of English monolingual caregiver-child dyads, using acoustic quantification to capture caregivers’ reading prosody including intonation/pitch (fundamental frequency (fo) mean and range), timing/duration (rate, frequency and duration of appropriate and inappropriate pauses), and intensity/loudness (intensity range) features of the caregivers’ reading. In Study 1, the caregivers read a children’s book to their child without extratextual discussion. Children then answered cued recall questions about the story. Findings revealed that caregiver intonation range and appropriate pause duration positively predicted unique variance in children’s cued recall accuracy scores, accounting for child age, broader listening comprehension skills, attention, and caregiver education. In Study 2, the caregivers were asked to read a children’s book to their child as they normally would at home. Findings indicated that caregiver intonation range positively related to child vocabulary, while inappropriate pauses negatively related to children’s core language skills. Mediation analyses showed that caregiver reading skills were indirectly linked to child language via prosody measures, with a moderated mediation effect for child vocabulary indicating this pathway was significant only among caregivers who reported low to moderate shared reading time at home.
Study 3 investigated contextual factors that may influence caregiver prosody during shared reading among Spanish-English bilingual caregivers. To account for the diverse ways in which bilingual caregivers present storybooks to their children, prosody was characterized into three presentation types: direct reading, text translation, and image-based storytelling. Analyses were conducted separately for English and Spanish book conditions. Linear mixed-effects models then revealed that caregivers’ relative language dominance related to their intonation range and pause measures. Moreover, intonation range differed between direct reading and text translation.
In combination, findings draw attention to an underrecognized and understudied aspect of shared reading that may promote young children’s language development. They also highlight the potential for targeting oral reading prosody in early intervention programs aiming to support children’s language skills via shared reading, including among families of caregivers with diverse language abilities or reading challenges.
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2025