Leamos Juntos! Bilingual books support Latine parents’ Spanish language use during book-sharing interactions

Book-sharing interactions expose children to more diverse language input than caregiver speech in other contexts. Yet most research on caregiver-child book sharing has focused on monolingual parents reading monolingual books. This study investigated how Spanish-English bilingual caregivers in the United States share different types of books with their children. Twenty-four Latine parents and their three- to five-year-old children shared a monolingual English-only book and a bilingual English-Spanish book. Caregivers used more total words and more different words in Spanish when sharing the bilingual book than the monolingual book. There were no differences in the number or diversity of words in English, or in caregivers’ code-switching, between book types. These findings show that bilingual books increase caregivers’ use of the home language (in this case Spanish) relative to books in the societal language only, and suggest bilingual children’s books may be one way of supporting children’s dual language development.