Literacy 8–12 months: what are babies learning?

Abstract

Shared book reading in families is strongly linked with successful school literacy and thus with identity, belonging and participation in literate societies. From an ‘emergent’ perspective, literacy is recognised as beginning from birth. However, despite exceptions such as research into the UK program, ‘Bookstart’, most research into shared book reading does not focus on babies. In this paper, I report on interactions during shared book reading between 10 babies aged 8–12 months, and their mothers. A detailed examination of linguistic and paralinguistic features of the interactions in the ten mother–baby dyads showed varying individual patterns of language use, discourse structure and paralinguistic interaction. There were also differences in children's dispositions to engage in the activity. The findings from this study have important implications for parent support, prevention/intervention programs, and early childhood settings that include infants and toddlers.