KU News Release

KU researcher sheds light on benefits of book reading for children

LAWRENCE — Most parents know that a good bedtime story can lull a child to sleep. And parents have long assumed that reading books with their child improves that child’s language skills and intellectual development.

So it is surprising that, until recently, there was not much real proof of the widely held notion that joint book reading improves children’s communication skills.

Now, a University of Kansas researcher has added to that evidence, showing that joint book reading is indeed associated with a child’s use of language and giving new details about how the variety of books and context of joint reading impacts linguistic development.

“It’s not that we doubted that joint reading was a good thing for children, but we wanted to provide empirical evidence on the topic,” said John Colombo, professor of psychology and associate director for cognitive neuroscience at KU’s Life Span Institute. “There were lots of proclamations, lots of declarations, lots of read-to-your-child weeks. But, for the most part, there wasn’t a lot of hard, solid evidence that it actually was good and what it was good for.”

Colombo recently published his findings in the Journal of Research in Higher Education. The study, supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, was conducted with W. Allen Richman, an assistant professor of education at Macon State College who holds a doctorate in developmental and child psychology from KU.

“We sent out a questionnaire and tried to get a fix for how much reading was going on, when did people start, how long did they read and what was the frequency,” said Colombo. “Then we asked some of those parents to keep a detailed, daily log of when and what they read with their children. For the most part, people read to their children about twice a day, for a little more than two hours per week on average.”

The KU researchers found that parents most often read with their 10- to 18-month-old children as part of a scheduled routine, such as at bedtime, but also spontaneously during play. Both kinds of reading had beneficial outcomes.

“We found in the end, the more book reading sessions there were, the higher the vocabulary of the child,” said Colombo. “It was a stronger effect for expressive vocabulary than it was for receptive vocabulary.”

Expressive vocabulary is the number of words one can produce, while receptive vocabulary is the number of words one understands. “By the time a child says a word, at 12 months typically, they actually know 50 to 75 words,” said Colombo.

In the study, mothers did the lion’s share of the reading, logging 66 percent of the titles read; fathers read 20 percent of the books; and others, like grandmothers, aunts and baby sitters, accounted for the rest.

“We have evidence from the original survey that people are reading regularly to their children from as early a four or five months,” said Colombo.

During reading that is associated with routines like bedtime, typically the reader selected the book and the book was read cover-to-cover. But during play, the child usually initiated the reading and the book was read “in snippets,” according to Colombo. Both kinds of reading had a positive effect on expressive vocabulary.

Another important factor was the variety of books read jointly during early childhood.

“The number of different books read per week was strongly associated with expressive vocabulary, even when you controlled statistically for the number of readings,” Colombo said. “Both the absolute number of readings was predictive of vocabulary, as was the number of unique titles that they read per week.”

Colombo said the message for parents is clear: Any kind of joint book reading is associated with improvement in a child’s vocabulary.

“We went out looking to confirm the veracity of claims about joint book reading,” Colombo said. “The data we got very strongly emphasized that this is something good for children.”

In the study, a total of 168 questionnaires were returned from the greater Kansas City area, while a subset of 45 participants logged their reading activity. Vocabulary was assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory.

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