Two studies investigated discussions of the meaning of unusual vocabulary encountered during shared book reading. In Study 1 parent-child dyads were observed longitudinally in senior kindergarten through grade 2 reading short storybooks below, at and just above the child's reading level. Here children did most of the reading. In Study 2 a second sample of parents of children in grade 1 all read the same book to their child. This book had numerous unfamiliar words, allowing an investigation of the characteristics of the words themselves that might influence whether parents and children discuss their meaning. In both studies a striking percentage of novel words encountered were not explained. Unusual words appearing last on a page's text were more likely to be discussed than were words appearing earlier on the page.

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This study examined differences in performance between 20 shy and 20 matched nonshy children on a narrative task and in the way parents scaffolded their narrative performance when reading the wordless book Frog, Where Are You, by Mercer Mayer. Consistent with previous research, results demonstrated that shy children spoke less than their nonshy peers and volunteered less story content. Parents, however, did not differ in how they scaffolded their children's speech turns, nor in the amount of semantic information they provided. Thus, these communicative differences were not accounted for by differential adult scaffolding. Implications for encouraging more verbal behavior from shy children and for the design of wordless storybooks are discussed.

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