Leamos Juntos! Bilingual books support Latine parents’ Spanish language use during book-sharing interactions

Book-sharing interactions expose children to diverse language input, yet most research on parent-child book-sharing has focused on monolingual parents reading monolingual books. This study investigated how Latine bilingual parents in the U.S. share different types of books with their children. Twenty-four Latine parents and their three- to five-year-old children shared a monolingual English-only book and a bilingual English-Spanish book. Parents used a higher proportion of total words and different words in Spanish when sharing the bilingual book than the monolingual book. They also engaged in more code-switching with the bilingual book than the English monolingual book. There were no differences in the number or diversity of words in English between book types. These findings show that bilingual books increase parents’ use of the home language (in this case Spanish) relative to books in the societal language only, and suggest they may be one way of supporting children’s dual language development.