Development

A study examined the ways in which Head Start preschool children's vocabulary developed when they and their mothers engaged in joint reading. Subjects, 19 dyads, were observed as they interacted around expository texts presented in both familiar (newspaper toy advertisements) and traditional (trade books) formats. Subjects were observed in their homes for 10 readings each, during which the dyads read a series of presented texts. The children's ability to identify words from the texts read and their comprehension of a standardized receptive vocabulary list were measured. Mothers talked more than children in all contexts; furthermore, different forms of talk were observed around the different text formats. Correlational and sequential analyses indicated that children's word recall was best predicted by responsive maternal strategies, such as encouraging children to talk about the text, and children's modeling of maternal strategies. (Contains 36 references and 5 tables of data. An appendix of data is attached.) (RS) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document