Talk outside the box: Parents' decontextualized language during preschool years relates to child numeracy and literacy skills in middle childhood

Children's literacy and numeracy skills are fundamental for early academic performance and later academic success, mental health, and employment prospects in adulthood. Given that parents play a key role in promoting child development, identifying early parenting behaviors that predict literacy and numeracy skills is a research imperative. Emerging evidence suggests that parental use of decontextualized language (DL)-talk that requires cognitive abstraction and transcends the here and now-predicts children's literacy skills. However, its relation to numeracy remains underexplored. Accordingly, the current study examined how DL during interaction with children in infancy (T1) and preschool years (T2) relates to child literacy and numeracy in middle childhood (T3). Participants were 26 Irish mother-father-child triads (16 female children). At T1 and T2, participants engaged in 5-min interactions that were coded for DL. At T3, child literacy and numeracy were assessed using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition and teacher report of child scores on national standardized tests. Controlling for child age and contextualized utterances, child reading in middle childhood was negatively related to maternal and child DL in infancy but was positively related to DL during preschool years, suggesting that the benefits of DL may become apparent later in development. Mothers', fathers', and children's DL during preschool years was also positively linked with child numeracy in middle childhood. Thus, embedding DL in conversation with children may have positive domain-specific and cross-domain effects on children's literacy and numeracy performance. Findings provide incentive for future research to examine relations between DL and children's school performance across a wider range of developmental domains.

Domain-specific and cross-domain effects of the home literacy and numeracy environment at 3 years on children's academic competencies at 5 and 9 years

This study examined whether children's formal and informal home literacy (HLE) and home numeracy (HNE) environments at 3 years old demonstrated domain-specific, and cross-domain effects on children's academic performance at 5 and 9 years old. Participants were 7,110 children (49.4% male; 84.4% Irish), recruited between 2007 and 2008 in Ireland. Structural equation modeling revealed that only the informal HLE and HNE demonstrated both domain-specific and cross-domain positive effects on children's language and numeracy outcomes but not on socioemotional outcomes, at 5 and 9 years old. Effect sizes ranged from small (β = 0.020) to moderate (β = 0.209). These results suggest that even casual cognitively stimulating activities that do not directly focus on active teaching may benefit children's educational outcomes. Findings bear implications for cost-effective interventions with far-reaching, and enduring, effects across multiple child outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).