Resumen de Narrative performance and parental scaffolding of shy and nonshy children

Kailey Pearl Reynolds, Mary Ann Evans

• This study examined differences in performance between 20 shy and 20 matched nonshy children on a narrative task and in the way parents scaffolded their narrative performance when reading the wordless book Frog, Where Are You, by Mercer Mayer. Consistent with previous research, results demonstrated that shy children spoke less than their nonshy peers and volunteered less story content. Parents, however, did not differ in how they scaffolded their children's speech turns, nor in the amount of semantic information they provided. Thus, these communicative differences were not accounted for by differential adult scaffolding. Implications for encouraging more verbal behavior from shy children and for the design of wordless storybooks are discussed.