Although research on the home literacy environment and its impact on early literacy has long focused on mothers, the past decade has seen a shift in scholarly attention to the role of fathers. Building on this shift, we examined whether the nature of parent–child interactions during shared storybook reading varies with parent gender, child gender and the interaction between the two, and we analysed whether possible differences in the nature of mother– and father–child interactions are related to story comprehension. We made video observations of mothers and fathers within 36 relatively highly educated families reading a storybook with their kindergartener (age 4 – 5) and registered the use of cognitively challenging (i.e. decontextualized) talk during these activities. After each shared reading session, we additionally administered a test assessing children’s understanding of the story being read. Two-way mixed ANOVA’s revealed no effects of parent gender or child gender on either the use of cognitively challenging talk or children’s story comprehension, nor did we find interaction effects of parent and child gender. The extent of cognitively challenging talk was significantly correlated to children’s comprehension scores for fathers, but not for mothers. This correlation seems to have masked another association, however: when correlations were computed separately for girls and boys, we found that the proportion of cognitively challenging utterances of both parents was correlated to comprehension scores for boys, but not for girls. The absence of parent gender effects provides further insights into the way mothers and fathers shape interactions during shared reading, but also stresses the need for studies with larger, more diverse samples. The observation that more frequent use of cognitively challenging talk was paralleled by better story comprehension for boys invites further research on the specific effects of shared reading for boys.

尽管关于家庭识字环境及其对早期识字影响的研究长期以来一直集中在母亲身上，但在过去十年中，学术界对父亲角色的关注发生了转变。在这种转变的基础上，我们检查了共享故事书阅读过程中亲子互动的性质是否随父母性别、子女性别以及两者之间的互动而变化，并分析了母子互动的性质是否可能存在差异与故事理解有关。我们对 36 个教育程度较高的家庭中的父母与他们的幼儿园儿童（4 至 5 岁）阅读故事书进行了视频观察，并记录了在这些活动中使用认知挑战（即去语境化）谈话。每次分享阅读课后，我们还进行了一项测试，评估孩子们对正在阅读的故事的理解。双向混合方差分析显示，父母性别或儿童性别对使用具有认知挑战性的谈话或儿童故事理解没有影响，我们也没有发现父母和儿童性别的交互影响。具有认知挑战性的谈话的程度与孩子对父亲的理解分数显着相关，但与母亲无关。然而，这种相关性似乎掩盖了另一种关联：当分别计算女孩和男孩的相关性时，我们发现父母双方的认知挑战话语的比例与男孩的理解分数相关，但与女孩的理解分数无关。父母性别影响的缺失提供了对父母在共享阅读过程中塑造互动方式的进一步见解，但也强调了对更大、更多样化样本的研究的必要性。更频繁地使用具有认知挑战性的谈话与男孩更好的故事理解并行的观察邀请进一步研究男孩共享阅读的具体影响。