Mother-child narratives in different contexts: Influence on children's emergent literacy skills

The aim of the current study was to assess mothers' co-construction of narratives with their preschool children in different contexts, and the impact these narratives have on children's emergent literacy skills. Emergent literacy refers to the skills that are developmental precursors to conventional forms of reading and writing and the environments that support these developments. Understanding what facilitates these skills is important to understand because children's initial literacy skill levels are predictive of their reading performance and oral language skills in later grade school years.;37 mother-child dyads created narratives using a wordless storybook as well as autobiographical memory (AM) narratives. Mothers' narratives were measured in several ways including style (e.g., elaborations, repetitions); cohesion, (i.e., interclausal connectives such as because); narrative coherence (e.g., utterances about orientations and internal states); episodic coherence (i.e. utterances regarding goals, obstacles, and repairs); and global ratings of narratives, which included ratings of focus, clarity, logic, and talkativeness. Additionally, children's emergent literacy skills were assessed by story comprehension, picture sequencing, and narratives using a wordless storybook, which were coded in the same way as mothers' narratives with children. In addition, several control variables were considered including children's age and language, socioeconomic status (i.e., mothers' education and family income), children's home literacy environment (assessed by parent questionnaire), and mothers' affective quality during mother-child narratives.;Hierarchical regressions were performed predicting children's emergent literacy outcomes controlling for factors that were related to predictor and outcome variables. Several independent relations were found between mothers' narrative variables and children's emergent literacy outcomes. Mothers' AM elaborative statements and elaborative tag-questions predicted children's story comprehension; and mothers' repetitive wh-questions in the book context were negatively related to children's story comprehension. Mothers' AM causal comments and mothers' obstacle comments in the book context predicted children's picture sequencing scores. Mothers' AM goal comments predicted global ratings of children's story generation; and global ratings of mothers' AM narratives predicted children's episodic coherence in their story generations. These findings have important implications for the environments that support children's early literacy before they begin formal schooling.