Learning about letters, and how they differ from pictures, is one important aspect of a young child's print awareness. To test the hypothesis that parent speech provides children with information about these differences, we studied parent-child conversations in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). We found that parents talk to their young children about…

This longitudinal study assessed the literacy development of native Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten to the end of first grade, focusing on the role of home literacy activities (mother-child shared book reading and joint writing). The contribution of these activities in kindergarten to children's reading and writing at the end of…