ABSTRACT
Joint reading between mothers and their children enjoys a privileged place in the child language and the early literacy literatures. Caregivers interacting with very young children around texts of various sorts, but especially children’s books, has been considered important in children’s learning individual vocabulary words at least since the time of Werner and Kaplan (1952). More recently interest in the role of mother–child book reading in children’s language learning was spurred by the work of Ninio and Bruner (1978; Ninio, 1980a, 1980b, 1983) and actively pursued by Snow (1983) and others (see Bus et al., 1995 for review).
