Study title

United Kingdom

Household

Individual

Recruitment and enrolment lasted 2 years 10 months between March 2015 and January 2018 and post-testing finished in March 2018. Eligible participants were monolingual children aged between 2;6 and 3;0 years living in the North-West of England. Exclusion criteria were, less than 37 weeks’ gestation, less than 5lbs 9oz at birth, prolonged and/or frequent ear infections, hearing another language (not English) for more than one day per week, children or parents who had a disability that prevented participation. There were 150 primary caregivers of which 10 were fathers, 2 were grandmothers and 1 was a childminder. Children were aged between 2;6 and 3;0 at the first visit (mean age = 32 months; SD = 2.07; range: 30 – 36 months) and 45% of children were female. The intervention ran for six weeks and the parents were provided with books to read with their children. The parents were asked to read two books to their child five times a week. Parents kept a reading diary and audio recorded shared book reading sessions with their child. Audio recordings were collected to assess compliance.Dyads attended a pre and post-intervention testing session. During these sessions we will collected a number of language measures: Standardised Language Assessments:(1) Preschool Language Scales - Fifth Edition (PLS-5). This is a published standardized measure of the language knowledge of individual children which contains the following sub scales; Auditory Comprehension and Expressive Communication. In the present study we used the raw score on the Auditory Comprehension subscale as a measure of language comprehension and the raw score on the Expressive Communication subscales as a measure of language production. We present the raw scores(2) The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Preschool 2 UK (CELF Preschool-2). This is a published standardized measure of the language knowledge of individual children. In the present study we used the ‘sentence structure’ subtest which assesses children’s comprehension of a range of simple and complex sentence structures. We present the raw scores.Naturalistic observations: The parent-child dyads played with toys for 10 minutes (toy play) and read books together for 10 minutes (shared reading). The order of the two activities was balanced across dyads. We collected video recordings of these sessions and we also transcribed a sample of these video recordings.