PREDICTING CHILDRENS LITERACY FROM MOTHER-CHILD CONVERSATIONS

Early mother-child conversations may be differentially related to children's emergent literacy, depending on the contexts examined and the function of specific utterance types within those contexts. Twenty White middle-class mothers talked about shared past events and read books with their children at 40, 46, and 58 months of age. Children completed a comprehensive literacy assessment at 70 months of age. Through regression analyses, distinct patterns of prediction emerged for children's print and narrative skills. Mothers' overall use of demanding, decontextualized utterances positively predicted children's print skills. However, mothers' increasing use of contextualizing utterances over the 18-month predictor period, especially during talk about the past, was an even stronger predictor of children's 70-month print performance. Finally, children's earlier participation figured more prominently in their later narrative skills than print abilities. Implications are discussed for scaffolding models of mother-child conversation and children's unique contributions to their own narrative development.