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Parents' early book reading to children: Relation to children's later language and literacy outcomes controlling for other parent language input
Journal article

Parents' early book reading to children: Relation to children's later language and literacy outcomes controlling for other parent language input

Ö Ece Demir Lira, Lauren R Applebaum, Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan C Levine
Developmental science, Vol.22(3), pp.e12764-n/a
05/2019
DOI: 10.1111/desc.12764
PMCID: PMC6927670
PMID: 30325107
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/6927670View
Open Access

Abstract

It is widely believed that reading to preschool children promotes their language and literacy skills. Yet, whether early parent-child book reading is an index of generally rich linguistic input or a unique predictor of later outcomes remains unclear. To address this question, we asked whether naturally occurring parent-child book reading interactions between 1 and 2.5 years-of-age predict elementary school language and literacy outcomes, controlling for the quantity of other talk parents provide their children, family socioeconomic status, and children's own early language skill. We find that the quantity of parent-child book reading interactions predicts children's later receptive vocabulary, reading comprehension, and internal motivation to read (but not decoding, external motivation to read, or math skill), controlling for these other factors. Importantly, we also find that parent language that occurs during book reading interactions is more sophisticated than parent language outside book reading interactions in terms of vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity.
Literacy Mathematics Vocabulary Humans Language Development Parents Child, Preschool Infant Male Comprehension Social Class Aptitude Reading Language Child Language Linguistics Female Books Parent-Child Relations Child Schools

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