Home Contributions to Early Language and Literacy Development

A study focused on types of talk between parents and children as predictors of development of skills such as narrating, explaining, and describing. The study investigated some measures of home language environment and their relationships with literacy outcomes. Eighty-four 3-year-old children from low income families in the Boston (Massachusetts) area were visited to gather information about the family's social and economic circumstances and their literary practices. The mothers were asked to read to and converse with the children during the visits, and, at the end of their kindergarten year, the children were given a battery of standardized tests of linguistic and cognitive skills and asked to perform a set of independent language tasks. Results indicated that a combination of home social and economic measures, general family conversation measures, and child language measures are the best predictors of formal definitions scores and story comprehension scores. However, results demonstrate the mother's impact in the information index (for bookreading) as a reflection of her ability to involve the child in the conversation. The presence of discourse talk in models predicting literacy outcomes suggests that families that engage in decontextualized talk, such as explanatory talk and narrative talk, expose their children to interesting and extended and sophisticated ways of expressing themselves. (Seven figures and seven tables of data are included.) (PRA)