Home Literacy and Numeracy Interact and Mediate the Relationship Between Socio-Economic Status and Early Linguistic and Numeracy Skills in Preschoolers

This longitudinal study aimed at evaluating the relationships between socio-economic status (SES) and early literacy and numeracy skills, testing home literacy and home numeracy as mediators. It also investigated the interaction of home literacy and numeracy on early literacy and numeracy skills. The study involved 310 preschool children attending the second and the third year. Parents completed questionnaires on SES and home literacy and numeracy. In the first session, children were administered language measures and non-symbolic numeracy skills and, in the second wave, tasks of early literacy and symbolic numeracy skills. Structural equation models (SEMs) showed that SES was predictive of early language and literacy skills and non-symbolic numeracy skills. In addition, home literacy and home numeracy significantly mediated the relationships between SES and children’s skills. Finally, home literacy and home numeracy showed a significant negative interaction on symbolic numeracy skills. Implications for research and educational settings are discussed

A Multi-Informant Approach Testing an Expanded Home Numeracy Mode

The role of home numeracy activities in the development of numeracy skills is receiving growing interest, although some mixed results highlight the need to consider models that include different contextual variables. The present study was aimed at investigating, using a multi-method and multi-informant approach, how parents' educational levels, parents' numerical attitudes, home numeracy, and expectations toward their offspring's numeracy attitudes concurrently predict children's early numeracy abilities as measured with early numeracy tasks and through teachers' evaluations. The sample includes 430 preschoolers, their parents, and 56 teachers. The children's early numeracy competence was assessed using digit recognition and digit-quantity association tasks and via a proxy-report questionnaire administered to their teachers. The parents were then administered a questionnaire investigating their educational levels, home numeracy activities, math attitudes, and expectations toward their child's numeracy ability. The results of the structural equation models revealed that both children's performance in numeracy tasks and the teachers' evaluation of their math skills were directly predicted by their parents' educational levels. In contrast, the parents' math attitudes were indirect predictors via the mediation of home numeracy. These results contribute to understanding the relationships between the investigated environmental variables and the children's early math skills. Additionally, the implications for early family-based interventions are discussed

The acquisition of spelling skills in bilingual children with Italian L2

The aim of this study was to deepen the acquisition of orthographic skills and their relationship with environmental and linguistic variables in bilingual and monolingual children. The study involved 86 monolinguals and 43 bilinguals (aged 9-11 years), who were administered with reading and writing tests for words and non-words, passage dictation, narrative written production, morphosyntactic comprehension and repetition of non-words; linguistic history and socio- economic status have also been investigated. Writing seems to require longer acquisition times than reading for bilinguals, however there are some advantages in narrative production tasks. Age of exposure, verbal knowledge, morphosyntactic comprehension and reading skills seem to play an important role in predicting writing skills in the bilingual group

Compétences numériques et de calcul chez les bilingues séquentiels: une étude longitudinale

L’étude présentée vise à analyser le développement des compétences dans le nombre et en calcul dans un groupe d’enfants bilingues séquentiels. L’étude inclut un échantillon de 133 bilingues suivis entre le début du CE1 et la fin du CE2. Les résultats ont montré que la tâche de calcul approximatif présentait un avantage significatif par rapport à celles d’écriture de nombres et de tables de multiplication. Nous avons aussi montré une réduction du pourcentage d’enfants avec des profils de difficulté en mathématiques