Shared picture-book reading: A sequential analysis of adult-child verbal interactions

The purpose of this study was to determine whether adults and children influence each other's representations of objects or events during joint picture-book reading. It was hypothesized that each partner adjusts his or her point of view on objects in order to share knowledge about pictures in the book. Seventeen adult/3-year-old child dyads were filmed during a reading session in a day-care centre. Sequences of child-adult and adult-child utterances were considered within exchanges on a common topic and were classified according to the level of abstraction conveyed. A novel Bayesian method for the analysis of directional dependencies revealed that the level of abstraction a partner adopts depends on the level that the other partner has just expressed. A constant reciprocal adaptation is attested by the overrepresentation of sequences of partners’ utterances belonging to the same level. Moreover, adults raise the level of abstraction more often than children, creating a ‘zone of proximal development’. Adults thus appear to stimulate the child's representational abilities since the child is found to follow the adult when the latter changes the level of abstraction.