Abstract
Learning about letters, and how they differ from pictures, is one important aspect of a young child’s print awareness. To test the hypothesis that parent speech provides children with information about these differences, we studied parent–child conversations in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). We found that parents talk to their young children about letters, differentiating them from pictures, by 1–2 years of age and that some of these conversational patterns change across the preschool years in ways that emphasize important features of letters, such as their shape. We also found that children talk about letters and pictures in distinct ways, suggesting an implicit understanding of some of the differences between letters and pictures at an early age. Some differences in parent–child conversations about letters were found as a function of socioeconomic status: Lower SES families appeared to focus more on alphabetic order than higher SES families. The general letter knowledge expressed in these conversations suggests that everyday interactions are an important component of the home literacy environment and that they differ, in some respects, as a function of child age and family background.
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Notes
Corpora that were included were: Bates, Bernstein, Bliss, Bloom70, Bloom73, Bohannon, Brown, Clark, Cornell, Demetras1, Demetras2, Feldman, Gleason, Haggerty, Hall, Higginson, HSLLD, Kuczaj, MacWhinney, Morisset, Nelson, New England, Post, Providence, Sachs, Snow, Suppes, Tardiff, Valian, VanHouten, VanKleeck, and Warren. The corpora are available for download on the CHILDES website at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/ (MacWhinney, 2000).
Because there were so few instances of utterances like write a picture, there were no inappropriate utterances for picture in some age ranges. This resulted in near-perfect coefficients and a large standard error for the effect of referent. This is a familiar problem for models that use the Wald statistic, as multilevel models do (Menard, 2002).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by NICHD Grant HD051610. We thank Michelle Lindblom, who performed the reliability coding; Brett Kessler, who performed the searches of CHILDES; Lindsey Clasen, who helped with the initial coding; and the members of the Reading and Language Lab, who provided feedback on a draft of the manuscript.
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Robins, S., Treiman, R., Rosales, N. et al. Parent–child conversations about letters and pictures. Read Writ 25, 2039–2059 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-011-9344-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-011-9344-5