The Effects of Parent-Child Book Reading on Eight Joint Attention Behaviors during Early Childhood

Abstract

This study focuses on a parent-child book reading intervention to measure improvements, if any, to eight joint attention (JA) behaviors of a child following a parent's eye gaze and other nonverbal cues. The literature review will address JA, language acquisition through JA, parent engagement in school, benefits and barriers to parent-child reading, shared reading strategies, and high quality books. This is a quantitative, within-subject, pretest posttest design; parent-child reading intervention will consist of parents sharing a book with their child for 20-minutes a day, five days a week, and for two weeks. Eight JA behaviors will be analyzed using a t-test to determine if parent-child reading has made improvements to four categories of JA and to determine if child gender effects improvements to JA behavior outcomes. Although there were only six participants, there was significant improvements to child's skill of following their mothers eye gaze (p = .05), following nonverbal cues (p = .02), and physically redirecting another person (p = .038). There was no significant data for self initiated shared attention (p = .1 8) and gender did not play a role in the improvement made to JA behavior outcomes (p = 1 .48). Overall, significant data showed parent-child reading interventions improved overall JA skills in early childhood children (p = .01) with an increased average score of M = 7.83 (SD= 5.31) out of 32 points.