Maternal oral reading expressiveness in relation to toddlers’ concurrent language skills across a continuum of early language abilities

Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers’ use of prosody in facilitating young children’s language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children’s language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been largely overlooked in research to date. Here we investigated whether maternal oral reading expressiveness is associated with language skills among late-talking and typical-talking toddlers.Method: 40 mother-child dyads, with toddlers classified as either late talkers (n = 18) or typical talkers (n = 22), engaged in a shared reading interaction. Acoustic measures of oral reading expressiveness (mean fundamental frequency (fo), rate) were compared between mothers of late versus typical talkers. Whole-group analyses then examined oral reading expressiveness in relation to toddlers’ concurrent receptive and expressive language skills across the continuum.Results: Between-group comparisons of mothers of late versus typical talkers revealed no group differences in oral reading expressiveness. Yet, whole-group, continuous analyses of maternal oral reading expressiveness in relation to toddler’s concurrent language skills revealed that maternal oral reading expressiveness, specifically mean fo, significantly contributed to the prediction of toddlers’ receptive language skills, accounting for demographic and socioeconomic factors.Conclusion: Initial findings suggest that maternal oral reading expressiveness is associated with children’s emerging language skills and warrant further investigation of how this relates to broader aspects of children’s home language environments. This work carries implications for oral reading expressiveness as one facet of shared reading with potential to facilitate early language skill development.