Children from disadvantaged families tend to have limited language skills compared to their advantaged peers. While many factors contribute to language ability, two aspects of the early caregiving environment are known to be correlated with child language outcomes 1) caregiver-child book reading and 2) caregiver contingent talk. Contingent talk refers to a style of communication whereby the caregiver talks about what is in their infant's current focus of attention. This style of talking can be facilitated when parents read books with their babies. The aim of this research was to establish whether asking parents to engage in contingent talk in the context of book reading promotes vocabulary learning. This study compared the effects of an intervention to promote contingent talk against a control where parents were given books but not given any training in how to read them in a contingent manner. The study included children from socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged families.The most cost-effective way to tackle the root causes of many social and educational problems is to intervene early in children's lives, before the problems have had a chance to entrench. Key to this strategy is improving children's language development in the early years. Children who enter school with good language skills have better chances in school, better chances of entering higher education, and better economic success in adulthood. Reading is very effective at boosting children's language. Children who read regularly with their parents or carers tend to learn language faster, enter school with a larger vocabulary of words and become more successful readers in school. Because of this, local authorities often commission services to promote family-based shared book reading (e.g. the Bookstart programme). However, recent studies suggest that shared book reading interventions work less effectively for children from disadvantaged backgrounds than originally thought, particularly when their parents have lower levels of education. This means that there is a danger that the benefits of shared reading will be restricted to children from more affluent homes and not get through to those who need them most. To solve this problem, we need to develop a better understanding of how reading interventions work, and of how parents use them. We need to identify what parents do and say when reading aloud with their children and why this makes reading so effective at boosting children's language. We need to find out whether differences in how parents read mean that parents from disadvantaged backgrounds use these language boosting behaviours less frequently. We need to determine how to design interventions that increase the use of these behaviours in all parents, especially those with lower levels of education. Then, once we have identified how reading interventions work, we need to determine how to help parents use them successfully in their daily lives. The aim of this project is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and use this knowledge to make it an effective language boosting tool for children from all social and economic backgrounds. In Work Package 1, we will identify what language boosting behaviours parents use in shared reading, and will determine how parents from different social/economic backgrounds use these behaviours during shared reading. In Work Package 2, we will create four targeted interventions, each focussed on a particular language boosting behavior, and investigate how they are implemented by parents from different backgrounds, and how they affect children's language development. In Work Package 3, we will explore what influences parents' decisions to read or not to read with their children, in order to work out why parents may be unwilling to read with their children and to identify how to make reading a more enjoyable experience. We will also evaluate the benefits of a new intervention, designed by national charity The Reader Organisation, to promote reading for pleasure. Across the project, we will study a range of language skills, covering the core language abilities that are essential for learning to read and write in school. We will produce one review article, 9 original research articles, 30 conference presentations, and activities for non-academic audiences at local and national level. We will also submit a Cochrane review on the effectiveness of shared reading interventions for language development. Our results will enable health professionals such as health visitors, early years educators such as nursery school teachers, and policy-makers in local and national government to design targeted, cost-effective interventions to improve the language of children between the ages of 0 and 5 years. The work addresses ESRC's strategic priorities Influencing Behaviour and Informing Interventions and A Vibrant amd Fair Society.

This study is an educational intervention developed to promote caregiver contingent talk with their infant during picture book reading and to establish whether or not levels of caregiver contingent talk in this context have a causal relationship with later infant language outcomes. When infants were 11months, a researcher visited participating families in their home to collect baseline measures. Caregivers completed questionnaires to measure demographic information, vocabulary development and frequency of shared book reading. Participants were then randomised to either an intervention condition where they were given picture books and asked to practise daily contingent talk while looking at them with their infants or a control condition where they were given books alone. At 15 months, caregivers visited the university for post-test data collection and again completed measures of vocabulary development and frequency of shared book reading. In addition, video recordings of dyads reading books together were analysed for quantity of child words. Finally, infants' real-time comprehension of familiar words was assessed using the looking-while-listening (LWL) procedure. Infants sat in front of a computer screen showing two pictures, one on either side (e.g., a ball and a shoe). We measured the accuracy with which infants looked to the correct picture upon hearing a word that describes it and how much time they took to do this.