The Linguistic Environment of Early Readers

Abstract

The social-linguistic experiences of early readers in interaction with their parents were compared to that of age peers from similar families. Twelve kindergarten children, six precocious readers (ER) and six prereading peers (PR), and their parents were subjects for this study. Children were matched on age, sex, and receptive vocabulary (PPVT). ERs were reading fluently at the third grade level. The PRs presented age-appropriate emergent literacy skills. All parents were middle class, and educated at least two years beyond secondary school. The oral language of all speakers was analyzed for variables considered to be facilitative of the development of decontextualized language. Analyses of the 36 audio-recorded interactions focused on elements that described each speaker's 1) language complexity, 2) conversational devices, and 3) topic, as well as the children's performance on two decontextualized language tasks. ERs' parents created an even more enriched language environment for their children than PRs' parents. All significant and nonsignificant differences relating to decontextualized language favored ER families. ERs did not differ from PRs on the decontextualized task of giving formal definitions, though they did produce more complete and comprehensible procedural descriptions.

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