Children's exposure to mind-related talk has been shown to foster young children's metacognitive understanding and to orient them to the patterns of literate language long before they commence formal literacy instruction at school. In this paper, we report on a longitudinal study of the mind-related talk of 22 mothers when their infants were aged…

This study investigated mother-child dyads of differing social status engaged in fantasy play (children were age 54 to 80 months). Contrary to expectations, high-status dyads did not produce more or more complex utterances during fantasy play than low-status dyads. Low-status dyads were characterized by more negative affect and child behavior…

The Early Childhood Project is a longitudinal investigation of contexts in which children from different sociocultural groups learn to read. Data collected from 41 families showed some consistency between parental beliefs on fostering reading development (entertainment versus skills perspective) and nature of experiences made available to…

Examines the relationship between developmental placement as a result of preschool and kindergarten developmental testing and children's later cognitive achievement and social-emotional growth. A total of 223 children in Grades two through six were coded as traditional, overplaced, or "Buy a Year" depending on Gesell Screening Test…

Tested assumption that variability in home literacy environments has no effect on individual differences in reading development. Found that variability in shared reading interactions was significantly related to growth in phonological awareness even after accounting for the effects of age, oral language, and phonological awareness at the beginning…