Processes by which verbal-educational abilities are affected when mothers encourage preschool children to verbalize

Devised a measure of mothers' (20-36 yrs old) encouragement of child-generated verbal responses from videotapes of 66 mothers teaching a block-sorting task to their children. Mothers were administered the WAIS, and children received the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence at 3-6 yrs of age. Correlations and partial correlations of mothers' encouragement of verbalization with children's knowledge of letters and numbers were significantly stronger than those with Verbal and Performance IQ, which were nonsignificant. It is concluded that this pattern of correlations is consistent with a specific verbalization-helps-memory-of-content mechanism and inconsistent with a more global verbalization-generally-helps-thinking mechanism. (57 ref)