This study used Latent Class Analysis to identify groups of children exposed to similar Home Language and Literacy Environments (HLLE) and explored whether belonging to a given HLLE group was related to children's language and early literacy growth from prekindergarten to kindergarten. Participants were 1,425 Chilean mothers and their children…

At what point in reading development does literacy impact object recognition and orientation processing? Is it specific to mirror images? To answer these questions, forty-six 5- to 7-year-old preschoolers and first graders performed two same-different tasks differing in the matching criterion-orientation-based versus shape-based (orientation…

Finds that preschool children remember lower case letters better if generally encouraged by their mothers to produce verbal responses and if their mothers have specifically taught lower case letters. Discusses three mechanisms that may explain this effect: mnemonic support for the child; membership in sociolinguistic group; and the teacher's being…