Pilot Findings

Abstract

Storybook reading is often credited as an important context in which children attend to and interact with print, thereby facilitating their acquisition of key emergent literacy concepts. To test the assumption that children visually attend to print in this context, this study used eye-gaze analysis to determine the extent to which four preschool children looked at print when being read two storybooks. Results showed that the children rarely attended to print; that is, they seldom fixated on print and infrequently entered "print zones" (areas on storybook pages containing print). There was, however, significant variation in children's visual attention to print when comparing the two books studied, with children attending to and fixating on print at higher rates with the storybook containing more salient print. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as future research directions, are discussed.