Revisiting Dialogic Reading Strategies with 12-Month-Old Infants

Dialogic reading (DR), first described in Whitehurst et al. (1988), is a specific reading technique that encourages parents to involve the child actively in verbal and nonverbal interactions during shared book reading. The well-known acronyms for DR techniques include CROWD (completion, recall, open-ended questions, wh-questions and distancing) and PEER (prompt, evaluate, expand and repeat). As DR was originally designed for children aged 2 to 5 years, it is less known about what the DR practices of parents would look like during shared book reading with 12 month-old infants. The current study analyzed observational data from 29 parent-infant dyads to address this issue during shared book reading. The results indicated that parents interacted with their 12 month-old infants by spontaneously applying most DR strategies during shared book reading, with some strategies used more frequently and commonly than others. The usage frequency of each DR strategy did not change as a function of infants’ background characteristics. Parents with infants who had better abilities in communicative gestures tended to use information from the book cover to prompt the children to talk about the story more frequently during shared book reading. These results make a unique contribution in providing both quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate what the DR practices of parents look like while reading with preverbal infants.