The impact of contextual, multimodal language input and child’s inhibitory control on the development of early literacy skills

2024-7
Bilgiç, İlkyaz Deniz
Current literature had previously highlighted the importance of early literacy skills in preschool children in terms of its prominence for future academic success. Although the emergence of literacy had been mostly investigated via maternal gesture use, there is only a limited number of studies where a multidimensional approach was adopted. The current study includes inhibitory control skills for assessing child-related influences, and the contextualised & decontextualised multimodal input for assessing parent-related influences targeting dual-earner family triads. Forty-five dual-earner families with 60-72 month old preschool children had provided audiovisual recordings of their natural interactions during playing two sets of games and filled out the parent form of an early literacy scale. The children had also participated in a behavior task. Results have shown that the self-regulation ability of the child had predicted early literacy skills. We had also found intercorrelations between father’s iconic, point and spatial gesture use with the total gestures performed. Lastly, we reported differences between female-child triads and male-child triads in terms of parental gesture use. Current study is one of the first to adopt a multidimensional approach to explore the development of early literacy skills from both perspectives: the child and the parents. The importance of inhibitory control skills, triadic paternal inclusion, and the need for further exploration of speech input conceptualizations had also been discussed in the article.
Citation Formats
İ. D. Bilgiç, “The impact of contextual, multimodal language input and child’s inhibitory control on the development of early literacy skills,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2024.