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Category: Project

Description: Previous research indicates that shared book reading during early childhood positively impacts language development (Shahaeian et al., 2018; Wasik et al., 2016), while extensive screen time might have the opposite effect (Dynia et al., 2021; van den Heuvel et al., 2019; Zimmerman et al., 2007). A recent study with a generous sample of 8–36-month-olds from 13 different countries, including Norway, found that, during the COVID-19 lockdown, parents who engaged more with shared book reading with their child, had children with increased growth in receptive vocabulary during this period, above and beyond what was expected from the normative data (Kartushina et al., 2022). The same study also found that children who spent more time with passive screen exposure had less prominent growth in expressive vocabulary. However, the study was undergone during the COVID-19 lockdown, which might limit the generalisability of the results to normal times. The current study aims to examine whether shared book reading and screen time affects early development of receptive and expressive vocabulary at 12 and 24-months of age in Norwegian toddlers.