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Abstract:
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The present study examined parent-infant didactic behaviors during a joint picture book reading task, comparing monolingual and bilingual 18- and 24-month-old infants and their parents under naturalistic conditions. The objective was to discern differences between monolingual and bilingual as well as 18- and 24-month-old dyads in measures of interactional behaviors and global PCI quality. There existed no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual dyads in either set of measures. However, at the 18-and 24-month stages as well as longitudinally, various behavioral and PCI measures correlated significantly with one another. As well, parents of 18-month-old infants fell under high- and low-quality scaffolding clusters, which in turn significantly predicted infant pointing and word frequencies. Longitudinal analyses indicated that PCI quality during joint book reading remains relatively stable over a six-month period of major language development. Implications for book reading and bilingual development are discussed. |