Sharing Tales That Teach: Shared Picturebook Reading for Early Childhood Emotional and Cognitive Development

Sharing Tales That Teach is a two-arm, parallel-group randomised controlled trial of a caregiver-delivered shared picturebook reading intervention for young children and their primary caregivers. The trial is embedded within a broader longitudinal cohort study examining the development of emotion regulation and executive function across the transition from Reception to Year 1.

The study is grounded in developmental evidence that emotion regulation and executive function are closely related capacities during early childhood. Emotion regulation supports children's ability to understand, express and manage emotional states, while executive function supports goal-directed behaviour through working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. Shared picturebook reading is used as the intervention context because it provides a naturalistic setting in which caregivers can scaffold language, attention, emotional understanding and self-regulatory strategies through everyday interaction.

Participants in the randomised subsample will be individually allocated at the caregiver-child dyad level to either an emotion-focused shared picturebook reading intervention or a standard dialogic picturebook reading active control condition. The active comparator is designed to control for shared reading exposure, caregiver attention, receipt of training materials and use of the same picturebooks, while excluding explicit emotion-focused and mental-state scaffolding. This design is intended to assess whether any observed benefit is attributable to the emotion-focused components of the intervention rather than to shared reading exposure alone.

Both conditions will be delivered by caregivers in the family home over an 8-week period. Caregivers in the emotion-focused condition will receive standardised training materials introducing strategies such as emotion labelling, discussion of emotional causes and consequences, modelling of regulatory strategies and reflective questioning. Caregivers in the standard dialogic reading condition will receive training in narrative and dialogic reading techniques, including naming, describing, sequencing and encouraging child participation through open-ended questions. Families in both groups will be asked to complete three shared reading sessions per week and will continue with usual educational provision and typical home or school activities.

Assessments will be conducted at baseline and approximately 12 months later. Home-based assessments will include age-appropriate child behavioural tasks and caregiver-completed questionnaires. A laboratory subsample will complete additional behavioural, observational and neurophysiological assessments at the University of Greenwich, including EEG/ERP measures where appropriate and tolerable for the child. Caregiver-child interaction tasks will be recorded and coded to examine features such as emotion talk, joint attention, turn taking and scaffolding. Audio recordings of the first and final home reading sessions will be collected to support assessment of intervention fidelity and differentiation between conditions.

The primary analytic focus is the comparison between trial arms on change in child emotion regulation from baseline to 12-month follow-up. Secondary analyses will examine change in child executive function, caregiver wellbeing and caregiver emotion regulation. Exploratory analyses will examine caregiver-child interaction processes and whether caregiver or child characteristics are associated with variation in intervention response.

The wider cohort will aim to recruit approximately 400 caregiver-child dyads. The embedded randomised trial will include approximately 200 dyads, with around 100 allocated to each condition. Analyses will follow an intention-to-treat framework, with participants analysed according to their original allocation regardless of intervention adherence. Longitudinal multilevel models and latent growth curve approaches will be used to estimate developmental change and compare trajectories between conditions. Models will adjust for relevant baseline variables where appropriate and account for school-level clustering where needed.

The study is low risk, non-invasive and educational in nature. No serious adverse events are anticipated. Potential minor risks include tiredness, boredom, frustration or brief distress during assessments, and possible sensory discomfort during EEG procedures for children in the laboratory subsample. Participant wellbeing, retention, data completeness, protocol adherence and adverse events will be monitored by the primary researcher in consultation with the supervisory team. No formal Data Monitoring Committee or interim efficacy analysis is planned. Data will be pseudonymised, stored securely on University of Greenwich systems and handled in accordance with UK data protection requirements and the approved ethics protocol.

• Child Inhibitory Control Accuracy: Flanker Visual Filtering Task [Time frame: Baseline and 12- month follow-up]
• Change in Child Cognitive Flexibility Accuracy Assessed by the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Child Working Memory Accuracy Assessed by the Working Memory Span Task [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver-Reported Child Executive Function Assessed by the Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver Self-Efficacy [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver Depression Anxiety and Stress [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver Emotion Regulation Difficulties Assessed by the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale Short Form [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver Inhibitory Control Reaction Time Assessed by the Go/No-Go Task [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver Cognitive Flexibility Reaction Time Assessed by the Alternate Switching Task [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Caregiver Working Memory Reaction Time Assessed by the 2-Back Task [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Change in Child Executive Function Behaviours Assessed by the Executive Function from Observation and Reflection Tool Short Form [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]
• Neural Correlates of Executive Function: ERP Indices of Cognitive Control and Response Inhibition [Time frame: Baseline and 12-month follow-up]