Letter Teaching in Parent–Child Conversations

Societies engage in cross-generational transfers of information, enabling cultural transmission of skills such as tool use and language (Tomasello, 2001). Reading and spelling are two of the most important cultural tools that are transferred to children in modern societies. This transfer begins with informal experiences in the home and continues with formal teaching at school. One skill that is critical to a child’s success during the first years of reading and spelling instruction is decoding, which is the ability to sound out written words. Decoding ability depends, in part, on a child’s knowledge of letters (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000). Given that learning about letters in the home can lead to improved letter knowledge and decoding ability (Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002; Evans, Shaw, & Bell, 2000; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002), we would benefit from a better understanding of what parents teach their young children about letters and what children learn from these experiences. Here we examine this letter teaching through observation of parent–child conversations, studying how letters are discussed in the homes of U.S. preschool children and how talk about letters changes over the early years of a child’s life

Young Children’s Knowledge about the Role of Print in Reading

Children begin to learn about the print in books and the role it plays in reading well before the onset of formal literacy instruction. Young children’s knowledge about precisely what readers are reading when they read books and who is able to read books has been studied primarily through interviews, but conclusions from this research are limited by methodological concerns. Three experiments examined whether pre-readers understand what part of a book is read and whether they distinguish between the skill of reading and the activity of reading. Although pre-readers were typically able to locate the print in a book, they appeared to still be learning that it is the print, not the pictures, that a reader reads. Pre-readers were knowledgeable about who has the ability to read, but many also indicated that the activity of reading does not require the ability to read. The results suggest that teachers and parents should not be careful not to overestimate the knowledge about print and reading that children acquire through everyday exposure to books

Pubertal Gonadal Hormone Exposure Influences Paced Mating Behavior in Female Rats

Adult sexual behavior depends not only upon perinatal development, but also upon typical pubertal growth. Research in rodents suggests the important role of pubertal gonadal hormones for the manifestation of adult sexual behavior and motivation. The neural circuits and hormones responsible for the display of female sexual behavior are beginning to be understood, whereas the role of pubertal gonadal hormones remains largely unknown. The current experiment compared the paced mating behavior of female rats that developed without pubertal gonadal hormones to the behavior of female rats that had the hormones. Female rats that developed without pubertal gonadal hormones had higher activity levels and left the male more frequently following a mating stimulation. Though these specific aspects of paced mating behavior may be altered, the general pattern remains following development without pubertal gonadal hormones

Prereaders' Knowledge about the Nature of Book Reading

These are the data files, script, and output for a project looking at what pre-readers know about words in books, the role print plays in reading, and who can read

Letter Teaching in Parent-Child Conversations

Analysis of the talk about letters in the Chicago Longitudinal Language Projec

Analysis Scripts

Script used for analyse

Procedure

How the transcripts were coded for the three analyses

Data

Transcripts and data used for analyse