Sarah Robins, Dina Ghosh, Nicole Rosales, Rebecca Treiman
Abstract
When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence children's early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies (Robins and Treiman, 2009; Robins et al., 2012, 2014) of parent-child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about similarities and differences in parent-child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the child's name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names (monograms), but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences (digrams). Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the child's name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent-child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to children's early literacy skills and school readiness.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 02 September 2014.
All research outputs
#15,304,580
of 22,761,738 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#18,591
of 29,672 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#133,725
of 228,107 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#292
of 389 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,761,738 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 22nd percentile – i.e., 22% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 29,672 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.5. This one is in the 31st percentile – i.e., 31% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 228,107 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 32nd percentile – i.e., 32% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 389 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 19th percentile – i.e., 19% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
