THE ROLE OF HOME LITERACY ENVIRONMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE ABILITY IN PRESCHOOL-CHILDREN FROM LOW-INCOME FAMILIES

The relations between home literacy environment and child language abi lity were examined for 323 4-year-olds attending Head Start and their mothers or primary caregivers. Overall frequency of shared picture boo k reading, age of onset of picture book reading, duration of shared pi cture book reading during one recent day, number of picture books in t he home, frequency of child's requests to engage in shared picture boo k reading, frequency of child's private play with books, frequency of shared trips to the library, frequency of caregiver's private reading, and caregiver's enjoyment of private reading constituted the literacy environment, and were measured using a questionnaire completed by eac h child's primary caregiver. Using a primary subsample of 236 children , a composite literacy environment score was derived from the literacy environment measures and was correlated with a composite child langua ge measure, derived from two standardized tests of language skills. De pending on the form of regression analysis employed and depending on w hether primary caregiver IQ and education were entered into the predic tion equations, from 12% to 18.5% of the variance in child language sc ores was accounted for by home literacy environment. These analyses we re cross-validated on a secondary subsample of 87 children with simila r results. The strength of the relations between home literacy environ ment and child language are stronger in this study than in previous re search,