Shared reading has long been recognized as a powerful engine for early language development. Unlike everyday conversation, which tends to recycle familiar vocabulary, books introduce children to novel words that rarely surface in routine exchanges. The dialogic nature of shared reading—parents and children co-constructing narratives from illustrations—gives children the chance to stretch beyond their current vocabulary through interactions with more knowledgeable partners. Yet despite a growing literature on shared reading, most of it has focused on monolingual families or relied on surveys and controlled experiments. How bilingual parents and children actually use their two languages during natural reading interactions at home has remained largely uncharted territory.

The research team, based at the University of Oslo, grounded their work in a social-interactionist framework, which holds that children’s language learning emerges through social interaction. They focused on two distinct ways parents turn a child’s attention to words, differing in their degree of elaboration. Labeling involves simply naming objects, characters, or actions in the book—for instance, saying

Labeling involves simply naming objects, characters, or actions in the book—for instance, saying “this is a forest”—while word explanations go further, offering definitions, descriptions, or elaborations, such as “when a place is filled with many trees, it’s called a forest.” The distinction matters because the two strategies are thought to support different aspects of vocabulary learning at different points in development. Labeling is concrete and direct, well suited to early word acquisition, whereas explanations become increasingly valuable as children’s language abilities grow and they can profit from richer, more elaborated talk about word meanings. Prior research suggests that parents naturally shift from one to the other as children mature, a sensitivity that reflects a broader tendency to tailor support to a child’s current abilities—what developmental theory describes as working within the child’s zone of proximal development.

What makes the new findings striking is that the difference between the two groups of families appeared in labeling but not in word explanations. Dyads who primarily read in their first language engaged in labeling more frequently than those who primarily read in their second language, yet the two groups did not differ in how often they provided word explanations. This asymmetry suggests that the choice of reading language shapes some forms of talk more than others. Naming an object in the moment may be easiest and most automatic in the language a family commands most comfortably, while offering an explanation—perhaps because it is a rarer, more effortful, and more deliberate move—may draw on resources that are less dependent on which language dominates the reading session.

The second major finding concerns code-switching, the alternating use of two languages within a single conversation or even a single utterance. Parents in the study code-switched more often during word explanations than during labeling, and this held true regardless of whether they primarily read in their first or second language. In other words, when parents moved from simply naming things to elaborating on what words mean, they became more likely to reach across their linguistic repertoire. This pattern offers a window into the functional, purposeful nature of bilingual speech: rather than mixing languages randomly, parents appear to deploy their second language precisely at moments of greatest communicative demand, when a child’s understanding may need extra support.

This kind of strategic language mixing is consistent with a growing body of research suggesting that bilingual parents use and combine their two languages for specific communicative purposes. For families raising children in a majority-language environment, the stakes of these choices are considerable. Parents from language-minority groups often must balance two competing goals: nurturing a minority heritage language at home while also preparing children for the language of formal schooling, which for most dual language learners is the majority language and their second language. Preschool entry frequently marks the beginning of systematic exposure to the majority language, which can place the minority language at risk of attrition. In the Norwegian context specifically, earlier survey work has found that parents report using their first language more when addressing their children than children do when addressing their parents—a pattern that underscores the parents’ central role as carriers of the heritage language.

Parents who wish to maintain their children’s proficiency in the heritage language are often aware of this responsibility and engage in deliberate practices to support it. The new study adds an important dimension to this picture by showing what those practices look like in the flow of actual reading interactions, rather than in parents’ retrospective reports. Because the data were collected naturalistically—families reading a wordless picture book at home, in their own space and on their own terms—the findings capture behavior that surveys and laboratory tasks may miss. Self-reports can be shaped by what parents believe they should do, and experimental designs can constrain the very behaviors of interest. Wordless picture books proved especially valuable here: unlike textbooks, which bilingual parents tend to read in the language of the text itself, wordless books free families to use either or both of their languages, revealing their natural preferences and habits.

The study also situates itself within a small but growing literature on how reading language relates to reading behavior. Previous work with English–French parents in Quebec found that parents reported reading more frequently and for longer stretches in their dominant language. Studies of Hispanic families in the United States have examined how parents’ preferred or primary language relates to their use of interactive and dialogic reading strategies, with mixed results—one study found that parents used strategies like asking questions and defining words most often when reading in their preferred language, particularly among those who preferred English, while another found no differences in dialogic strategies across language groups. By moving beyond self-report to direct observation, and by distinguishing between two specific forms of talk that differ in elaborateness, the Norwegian study refines the questions this literature can ask: it is not simply whether reading language matters, but which kinds of talk it shapes and which it leaves untouched.

The distinction between labeling and word explanations also connects to a broader research tradition on how parents draw children’s attention to words. Researchers have long noted that parental input during literacy activities varies from concrete to elaborated talk, and that word explanations in particular appear to be used infrequently during shared reading of textbooks. Studies examining whether mothers’ tendency to explain words relates to their educational level have produced mixed findings, suggesting that the drivers of elaborated talk are complex and not reducible to demographic variables. The present findings hint that the language situation of the family—specifically, which language anchors the reading session—may be one of those drivers, at least for the more automatic forms of word-focused talk.

There is also a developmental dimension worth emphasizing. As children grow more linguistically competent, parents may shift from labeling toward explanations, adapting their talk to match the child’s evolving abilities. The finding that code-switching clusters around explanations suggests that bilingual parents may treat their full linguistic repertoire as a flexible toolkit for this adaptation. When a simple label suffices, one language can carry the interaction; when a concept requires unpacking, the parent may reach for whichever language offers the clearest path to understanding, even mid-sentence. Such moment-to-moment decisions, repeated across countless reading sessions, could have cumulative consequences for how bilingual children build vocabulary in each of their languages.

The work builds on the research group’s own earlier qualitative observations of a small number of bilingual dyads, in which they noticed that parents who relied heavily on their first language actively worked to keep the conversation there—sometimes redirecting a child who used a second-language word by asking for the first-language equivalent. Scaling up to 151 dyads allowed the team to test whether the patterns glimpsed in that small sample held systematically across a larger, more diverse set of families. The confirmation that first-language-dominant dyads label more often, and that code-switching tracks explanatory talk across both groups, lends quantitative weight to what had been qualitative impressions.

For practitioners and policymakers, the findings carry practical implications. Shared reading programs aimed at bilingual families often encourage dialogic techniques, including asking questions and explaining word meanings. The evidence that parents naturally reserve their most elaborate, cross-linguistic talk for explanations suggests that such programs should acknowledge, rather than discourage, the strategic use of both languages. A parent who switches languages to clarify a word’s meaning is not undermining the heritage language project; they may be doing precisely what the interaction requires to keep the child engaged and comprehending. At the same time, the lower rate of labeling among second-language-dominant dyads raises questions about the vocabulary input children receive in each language during book time, and about whether families who read mainly in the majority language may be providing fewer of the quick, concrete naming moments that fuel early word learning in the heritage language.

More broadly, the study demonstrates the value of naturalistic observation for understanding bilingual family life. Language use at home is fluid, context-sensitive, and shaped by goals that parents may not articulate but reliably enact. By identifying systematic links between the language of reading, the type of talk, and the likelihood of code-switching, the research offers a template for future work: examining whether these patterns hold for other book types, older children, and other bilingual communities, and whether the talk patterns observed in reading predict children’s vocabulary growth over time in each of their two languages. In the meantime, the picture that emerges is one of quiet sophistication—parents orchestrating two languages with apparent effortlessness, in service of a child’s expanding understanding of words and worlds.

Subject of Research: Bilingualism

Article Title: Bilingual parent–child dyads' language use and code-switching during shared reading: exploring variations across labeling and word explanations

Article References: Bilingual parent–child dyads' language use and code-switching during shared reading: exploring variations across labeling and word explanations. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2026.1934991

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/flang.2026.1934991

Keywords: code-switching, shared reading, bilingualism, labeling, word explanations, language development, parent-child interaction, scaffolding, dual language learners, Norway, Bilingual, parent