Looking or talking: Visual attention and verbal engagement during shared book reading of preschool children on the autism spectrum.
Parent questions and prompts during book reading boost preschoolers’ immediate looking and talking, but extra steps are needed to turn that into literacy skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wicks et al. (2020) watched preschoolers with autism and their parents read picture books together. They coded every second of video to see how often parents asked questions or gave prompts. They also tracked where the child looked and how much the child talked.
The team wanted to know if parent talk boosted child attention and speech during the book task. They also checked whether those moment-to-moment gains linked to early literacy scores.
What they found
When parents asked questions or prompted, kids looked at the book more and spoke more right away. These immediate boosts, however, did not predict letter or vocabulary knowledge later.
In short: parent talk helps in-the-moment engagement, but the leap to actual reading skills is not automatic.
How this fits with other research
Bottema-Beutel et al. (2021) reviewed 65 studies and found that caregiver talk tied to child attention strongly supports language growth. Rachelle’s findings line up: parent questions did increase attention and speech.
Haebig et al. (2013) showed that responsive parent talk at age two forecast receptive language three years later. That looks like a contradiction, yet the difference is the outcome measure. Eileen tracked broad language gains, while Rachelle tracked specific literacy items. Momentary engagement may need extra teaching steps before it turns into letter knowledge.
Brigham et al. (2010) also used frame-by-frame coding and showed parent attentional cues lengthened object gaze during free play. Rachelle extends this result to a book-reading context and adds verbal output as a second payoff.
Why it matters
You can use shared book reading to grab attention and elicit speech right away. Keep asking open questions and prompting, because these moves work in real time. Do not assume the same activity alone will teach letters or vocabulary. Pair the book talk with direct letter-naming or sound games if those are your targets.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children who have an autism diagnosis often have trouble learning to talk and read. These difficulties become noticeable before children start school and may be linked to lower attention and engagement in literacy-related activities such as sharing storybooks with their parents. To date, few researchers have looked at possible ways to measure how children on the autism spectrum engage during shared storybook reading, for example, where children look or how much they talk, and how this may be related to their letter-name knowledge and their vocabulary knowledge. In this study, we analyzed videos of 40 preschoolers on the spectrum and their parents sharing an unfamiliar storybook. We wanted to see whether where children looked (i.e. toward the storybook, their parent, or elsewhere) and how much they talked were related to what their parents did (e.g. ask questions or provide prompts) and/or children's letter-name knowledge and vocabulary. The videos were coded for different child and parent behaviors. We found that where children looked and how much they talked were strongly related to each other and what parents did during the shared book reading interaction, particularly asking questions and using prompts. In contrast to what we expected, where children looked was not related to children's letter or vocabulary knowledge. Overall, results of the study draw attention to the connection between what parents do and what preschoolers on the spectrum do when sharing storybooks and provide directions for future research.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2020 · doi:10.1177/1362361319900594