While interactive touchscreens are currently entering into educational practice, little is known about what this means for learning in early childhood and, in particular, how touchscreens shape action and communication. In this paper, we examine the interactions of 2-year-olds and their teachers in a multilingual preschool in Sweden. We analyse…

The possibilities and challenges of digital technologies for young children are widely documented. However, parental guidelines place greater emphasis upon potential harms, advocating that parents limit their children's screen time, or advise that parents simply read digital texts as they would a printed text. Our study investigated 22 Australian…

This paper outlines the findings of an empirical research study exploring how Early Years Educators (EYEs) support under-threes with their early reading development in England. The data were collected through a mixed methodological approach of an initial survey, five semi-structured interviews and four reflective Zines to explore the experiences…

This research aims to address the contribution of the immediate contexts of the home in the development of regulatory skills, specifically executive functions and emotional regulation abilities in a Latin American context using direct behavioural measures. The sample consisted of 75 mother-infant dyads of 18-24 months belonging to homes and…

This study evaluated the impact of a parenting intervention on children's cognitive and socioemotional development in a group of caregivers and their 21-to-28-month-old children in a low-income South African township. A randomized controlled trial compared an experimental group (n = 70) receiving training in dialogic book-sharing (8 weekly group…

Children's language and cognitive development are informed by adult spoken language and parental literacy behaviors, although their relative contributions have not been evaluated. Using digital audio-recorders, we unobtrusively observed the spoken language of 107 children, aged 24 to 48 months (M = 32, SD = 6.5), and their families over 3 days (M…

Research Findings: This study investigated the prevalence of pedagogical questions posed by 27 early childhood educators as they interacted with infants in each of two naturally-occurring contexts: book-focused interactions and educator mediated play. The pedagogical questions expressed by educators to infants were coded as "confirm"…

For many Indigenous children living in remote communities, the prerequisites to achieving strong language and learning outcomes include the maintenance of their first languages and progress in learning English as an additional language. This paper reports on data from a Linkage study conducted with families at two Families as First Teachers (FaFT)…

Lexical development of bilingual children is influenced by a number of input factors. In the present study, early lexical skills of 25-month old children growing up with Turkish and German were assessed. Parents of 92 children filled out a newly developed list for productive Turkish vocabulary, as well as a vocabulary list for German. A parental…

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0-36…

In 19 (sub)samples from seven countries (United States, Austria, Germany, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Vietnam, Brazil), we analyzed the impact of parental education compared with wealth on the cognitive ability of children (aged 4-22 years, total N = 15,297). The background of their families ranged from poor indigenous remote villagers to academic…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of personalized books on parents' and children's engagement during shared book reading. Seven native English parents and their children aged between 12 and 33 months were observed at home when sharing a book made specifically for the child (i.e. a personalized book), a comparable book with no…

A Day in the Life is an interdisciplinary study of thriving 2-year-old girls and their families in diverse communities around the globe. We understand development to be active participation in cultural systems of practice, and examine children's interactions with their caregivers, other companions, and the environment. We focus upon children…