The Relationship Between Middle-Class Parents\u27 Book-Sharing Discussion and Their Preschoolers\u27 Abstract Language Development.

Thirty-five mothers and fathers were videotaped in their homesas they read a familiar and unfamiliar book to their preschoolersaged between 3;6 and 4;1. Parental discussions about the textwere coded for four levels of abstraction and correlated withchildren\u27s gains one year later on a formal test of the samefour levels of language abstraction (the Preschool LanguageAssessment Instrument). Parental input at three of the fourlevels of abstraction was positively and significantly correlatedwith their children\u27s gains at the highest level of abstraction.This was also the level at which children\u27s scores were thelowest initially and showed the greatest gains. The resultssuggest that discussions during book reading with preschoolersmay be a positive influence, since it was parents\u27 amount ofinput at lower as well as higher levels of abstraction thatcorrelated with the children\u27s development of more abstractlanguage. We speculate that more input at lower levels mightenhance learning by creating a climate of success in allowingchildren to display mastered skills, whereas more input at higherlevels might enhance learning by challenging children with abstractlanguage skills they are just beginning to acquire. In contrastto previous research, these results suggest that there is agreat deal of variability in middle-class families in the amountof input that children receive at various level of abstractionsduring book sharing