Does the brown banana have a beak? Preschool children’s phonological awareness as a function of parents’ talk about speech sounds

Abstract

Children’s phonological awareness develops rapidly in the preschool years and is an important contributor to later reading skill. This study addresses the role of parents’ talk in preschool children’s phonological awareness development. A community sample of 27 parents and their 3- to 4-year-old children participated in a new ‘Sound Talk’ observational measure. Children completed measures of phonological awareness, language, and literacy. Parents who used more sound talk in the observation had children with more advanced phonological awareness, even after controlling for children’s language skills and sociodemographic factors. These results have implications for designing interventions with parents to foster their children’s phonological awareness.

Keywords

Language literacy parent–child interactions phonological awareness preschool children

Introduction

Children’s awareness of the sounds of speech – their phonological awareness – is a strong predictor of their reading success (Lonigan et al., 2009; Metsala, Stanovich, & Brown, 1998; Schneider & Berger, 2012; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Awareness of speech sounds begins developing in the preschool years (e.g., Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony, & Barker, 1998) and is thought to be causally linked to children’s ability to match sounds to print (the alphabetic principle) at the beginning of reading instruction (Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988; Schneider, Küspert, Roth, Visé, & Marx, 1997). In the preschool years, children’s phonological awareness is posited to proceed from larger to smaller units of speech (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000). For instance, many younger English-speaking preschoolers demonstrate sensitivity to word-level syllables (e.g., cow in ‘cowboy’) but not to syllables embedded within words (e.g., ‘bot’ in ‘bottle’) or to individual phonemes (‘b’ in ‘bottle’). Older preschoolers, in contrast, are developing proficiency in these higher-level phonological skills at the syllabic and phonemic levels; for middle-income children, this development is particularly rapid from ages 3 to 4 years (Lonigan et al., 1998). Critically, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have lower phonological awareness skills than children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and the gap between low-SES and high-SES children in their phonological awareness widens during primary school (e.g., Schiff & Lotem, 2011). Although it is clear that children’s phonological awareness is developing from the preschool years, the environmental contributors to this development in the preschool years are still unclear. The main aim of the present study is to explore verbal interactions between parents and children that are linked to preschool children’s developing phonological awareness. It is important to ascertain whether parents are engaging in language interactions, as defined by language activities that are already occurring between parent and child, that support children’s phonological awareness. These naturally occurring interactions could then be used as the foundation for intervention work with parents.

We acknowledge that phonological awareness can be taught directly to children, even in the preschool period. A growing body of research indicates that children’s phonological awareness in the preschool years can be fostered by specific kinds of interactions with adults, with resulting benefits for children’s reading (see Bus & van IJzendoorn, 1999, for a meta-analysis). For instance, one intervention with kindergarteners included intensive training in blending and segmenting words orally, with large benefits for both aspects of children’s phonological awareness (Torgesen, Morgan, & Davis, 1992). A phonological awareness curriculum for preschoolers (Sound Foundations) effectively increased children’s phonological awareness and their subsequent reading through second grade (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993, 1995), with stronger effects when researchers rather than teachers led the program. The 12-week program comprises small-group teaching of sounds through direct instruction, with the final week of the program consisting of phonological awareness games. For instance, children play ‘Snap’ by matching cards depicting objects that start or end with the same sound. In another intervention led by teachers, kindergarten children’s phonological awareness (initial sound blending and segmentation) grew faster over a 3-week period when teachers read conventional alphabet books, in which letters were associated with an example word (‘B’ is for bear), compared to children whose teachers read storybooks to them over the same time period (Murray, Stahl, & Ivey, 1996; cf. Brabham, Murray, & Bowden, 2006). Finally, in a brief 2-week intervention with Hebrew-speaking preschoolers, parents were coached in interactive book-reading, including comments related to print as well as to meaning, using either an electronic or printed version of the same book over five readings in comparison to a no-treatment control group (Korat, Shamir, & Heibal, 2013). Post-intervention, both groups of children who received the interactive book-reading increased in their phonological awareness relative to the control group. These interventions show that preschool children’s phonological awareness can be increased with systematic instruction, with enduring effects for children’s reading. To date, however, there is no evidence that parents typically engage in direct teaching of phonological awareness with their preschoolers. In fact, parents rarely even refer explicitly to speech sounds in their naturally occurring language interactions with their children. In an analysis from the CHILDES corpus of 172 parents’ naturally occurring speech to preschoolers, parents frequently referred to letters in their everyday interactions with children, but only rarely to the sounds of letters (Robins, Treiman, & Rosales, 2014).

Another way that parents could be contributing to their children’s growing phonological awareness is indirectly, through enhancing children’s vocabulary skills. A prominent theory of the development of phonological awareness is that it is initially driven by the child’s vocabulary (Metsala & Walley, 1998). As children acquire new words that sound similar but differ at the phonemic level or higher (e.g., dog, dig, dug; haystack, hayride), they are developing denser ‘neighborhoods’ of words that are phonologically similar. Children with higher-density neighborhoods of words that sound similar are better able to segment parts of words, and eventually individual phonemes. Children with a larger vocabulary are more likely to possess these high-density neighborhoods. Thus, even though phonological awareness does not require semantic proficiency, in that children do not need to understand the meaning of a word in order to have an awareness of the sounds of the word, children with better semantic skills (i.e., larger vocabularies) end up with better phonological skills. Indeed, receptive and expressive vocabulary correlates with children’s phonological awareness in the preschool years (e.g., Lonigan et al., 1998; Metsala, 1999). Because children’s vocabulary is theorized to drive children’s phonological awareness, any environmental factor that enhances children’s vocabulary is believed to indirectly benefit children’s phonological awareness. The main environmental contributors to children’s vocabulary levels are the quantity and quality of speech input that children receive from the first year of life (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991; Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005), including the quantity and quality of shared picturebook-reading (e.g., Haden, Reese, & Fivush, 1996; Hindman et al., 2014; Read, Macauley, & Furay, 2014; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Whitehurst et al., 1988; see Mol, Bus, de Jong, & Smeets, 2008 for a review).

Indeed, parents’ reading of rhyming and alphabet books may foster directly their children’s phonological awareness, but to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing research on parents’ reading of rhyming and alphabet books specifically in relation to children’s phonological awareness. For instance, Stadler and McEvoy (2004) found that parents made more references to letter sounds and rhymes when reading rhyming and alphabet books versus narrative books with their preschoolers, but they did not include a measure of children’s phonological awareness.

Thus, it seems likely that parents are indirectly enhancing their children’s phonological awareness through interactions that boost children’s vocabulary skills. Are there other – as yet undiscovered – ways that parents may be more directly contributing to their children’s phonological awareness? Knowledge about naturally occurring parent talk that fosters phonological awareness is important for designing interventions with parents of young children who may need help with phonological awareness in the preschool period (cf. Korat et al., 2013). Such interventions could complement other programs in the preschool.

A primary question for the present study is whether some aspect of parent–child interactions is directly linked to children’s phonological awareness. For instance, parents who play rhyming or alliteration games with their children, who sing rhyming songs more often with their children, or who engage in other types of wordplay (e.g., tongue twisters), may be fostering their children’s phonological awareness. These interactions may occur at unpredictable times, and parents may not always be conscious of how often they are engaging in soundplay, so these interactions may be difficult to capture naturalistically or through parent report. We developed a new analogue procedure (Haynes, O’Brien, & Kaholokula, 2011) to elicit parents’ sound-focused verbal interactions in the lab. We wished to ascertain the diverse types of sound talk in which parents engage, as well as their relative frequency. Analogue observations provide an assessment situation designed to increase the likelihood that behaviors or interactions of interest will occur. Analogue assessment is potentially a less costly and time-intensive alternative to naturalistic observations, especially when studying interpersonal interactions. Our prediction was that parents who engaged in more sound talk would have children with higher levels of phonological awareness, even after controlling for the important correlates of children’s spoken language and alphabetic knowledge (Hipfner-Boucher et al., 2014).

Method

Participants

We recruited 51 parent–preschooler dyads as part of a larger study of children’s language and literacy development. Six children were excluded because they did not fit the criteria for the larger study. For example, English was the second language for one family and some children were outside the desired age range. The first 10 participants were part of a pilot study to develop the new task.¹ Only information regarding the final sample of 35 children and their parents is reported here. The participants were parents and their 36- to 60-month-old children (M = 48 months, SD = 6 months). Participants were recruited through advertisements at the local library and through newsletters to preschools. Thirteen of the children were girls and 22 were boys. Twenty-seven of the accompanying parents were mothers and eight were fathers. Parents used the total response method to identify their child’s ethnicity. Twenty-nine participants identified their children as solely of New Zealand European descent; five participants identified their children as American, Australian, South African, European, or New Zealand descent; and one parent did not provide child ethnicity information. All families spoke primarily English in the home. Parental education was assessed on a six-point scale (one = primary school education, six = postgraduate degree). Mothers and fathers reported an average education level slightly above a polytechnic qualification. Maternal education levels ranged from 3 (school certificate) to 6 (postgraduate qualification), and paternal education levels ranged from 2 (intermediate) to 6 (postgraduate qualification). Parents also reported their occupations on a separate six-point scale, ranging from unskilled laborer to professional. The sample was largely middle-class, based on the Elley–Irving Socio-Economic Index (Elley & Irving, 2003) for occupations in New Zealand.

Procedure

Parent–child observation

Parents and children attended a university laboratory visit where initially an analogue measure of parents’ sound talk was obtained through a 6-minute videotaped interaction. A female researcher told parents, ‘One thing we’re interested in is how much your child notices the sounds of words. We’re going to give you two different sets of toys to play with for a few minutes each. Could you draw your child’s attention to the sounds of the words for these toys, in whatever way feels natural to you?’

Dyads were provided with two sets of toys, for 3 minutes at a time. Piloting revealed that this amount of time was long enough to capture individual differences in parents’ sound talk yet short enough to prevent children from getting bored with the toys. The order of presentation of the two sets of toys was counterbalanced. The toys were a rhyming set, including toy peas, trees, keys, and two letter ‘B’s, and an alliterative set, all beginning with the letter ‘B’ (e.g., banana, ball, bell, and a butterfly). Each set of toys was presented separately to the parents and children in an open container. The experimenter left the room and interactions were recorded discreetly using a video camera placed in the corner of the room. The length of the interactions was timed using a stopwatch beginning once the dyads were presented with the first set of toys. After 3 minutes the experimenter returned with the other set of toys.

Following the parent–child observation, parents completed a demographic information form while a trained postgraduate student assessed the child’s language, phonological awareness, and literacy in a separate area of the lab.

Children’s language, phonological awareness, and literacy

Children’s oral language was assessed using the Test of Early Language Development, Third Edition (TELD-3, Form B; Hresko, Reid & Hammill, 1999). The TELD taps receptive and expressive vocabulary as well as syntax, and yields receptive and expressive language subscales as well as an overall spoken language score. Some of the items of the TELD were altered to fit the New Zealand context in which it was administered. For example, the word ‘fender’ was replaced with ‘bumper,’ and the word ‘janitor’ was replaced with ‘cleaner.’ Standard scores were used in analyses.

Two subtests of the Pre-Kindergarten Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Pre-K DIBELS; Dynamic Measurement Group, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c) were used to assess children’s phonological awareness, and one subtest to assess alphabetic knowledge. DIBELS Word Parts (Dynamic Measurement Group, 2007c) involves the child naming the parts or syllables of a word one by one. DIBELS First Sound Fluency (FSF; Dynamic Measurement Group, 2007a) assesses onset phonemic awareness by asking the child to say the first sound in a word presented orally by the experimenter. DIBELS Letter Naming Fluency (LNF; Dynamic Measurement Group, 2007b) assesses children’s ability to recognize the names of randomly ordered letters, and was used as a control for children’s alphabetic knowledge. In previous research in New Zealand, these measures correlate with standardized measures of language skills in preschool children, with FSF and LNF predictive of reading progress in children beginning school (Schaughency, Struthers, & Kaminski, 2012).

Coding of parent–child observation

The video interactions were transcribed and the first 3 minutes of conversation regarding each toy set interaction was coded. The parent coding system was exhaustive and mutually exclusive and coded the specific qualities of parents’ speech. Children’s speech was coded as either on- or off-topic, or incomprehensible. The coding unit was an utterance, as defined by a conversational unit taken without pause. For the purpose of this article, six parent speech categories were analyzed, along with parents’ and children’s total talk in the interaction. Three of the categories were specifically related to speech sounds: implicit sound talk (IMP), in which the parent emphasizes word parts, alliteration, and sound repetition (e.g., BA-na-na; Does the brown banana have a beak?); explicit sound talk (EXP), in which the parent explicitly points out a sound (e.g., What did you hear there?; Do they all start with B?); and rhyming talk (RHY) in which the parent emphasizes rhyme (e.g., Peas, and keys, and trees, and Bs; Do peas and keys rhyme?). These three categories were also summed to create a total sound talk variable (SOUND). The other three categories were not specific to speech sounds: letter naming (LN) where the parent explicitly mentions letter names (e.g., B for ball; What letter does ball start with?), counting (COUNT) where the parent uses counting talk (e.g., One tree, two trees; Are there four keys?); and a semantic category (SEM), which included meaning-related comments about personal experiences or general knowledge (e.g., You had peas for dinner last night; What can you do with keys?). An additional three categories were not included in analyses. These were behavior (BEH), which were task-related comments about toy play (e.g., Put the tree on the peas; What are you doing with it now?); unclassified (UN), which were incomprehensible utterances; and off-topic (OFF) utterances.

Two coders independently coded 25% of the transcripts to evaluate inter-rater reliability. Inter-rater reliability was 84% for parent codes (Cohen’s kappa = .83) and 96% for child codes (Cohen’s kappa = .87). The main coder then coded the remainder of the transcripts.

Results

Preliminary analyses

Due to the small number of fathers participating, we did not conduct analyses as a function of parent gender. There were no significant differences in any of the measures as a function of child gender (ps > .05). Analyses regarding the group as a whole are reported below. We first calculated Pearson’s correlations between parental education, occupation, and the parent and child measures. There were no statistically significant correlations between parental education and the interaction task; however, there was a significant correlation between paternal occupation and parents’ implicit sound talk (r = .42, p = .05). Parents from families of higher occupational status made more of these utterances. There was also a significant correlation between maternal education and children’s receptive (r = .39, p < .05) and overall spoken language (r = .42, p < .05). Maternal education and paternal occupation are covaried in the final analyses below.

Eight parent–child dyads were excluded from the analyses of observed sound talk due to the short length of their interactions. In these instances, the child either sought out the experimenters, or the parents told the experimenters they had completed the task. On average, these eight dyads differed from the remaining participants in terms of child age, t(33) = 2.48, p = .02, and paternal education, t(29) = −2.73, p = .01, but not on any other demographic variables or language and literacy measures (ps > .05). Children in the excluded group were 6 months younger on average, and fathers of the excluded group had a higher education on average. Because these interactions were too short to analyze, only the remaining 27 dyads who had completed the full 6 minutes of interaction were retained for analyses. For these 27 dyads, the mean age of the children rose slightly to 49.11 months (SD = 5.88; range 38–59 months), but the range of parental education and occupation remained the same. Across the 6 minutes of interaction, parents of these 27 dyads provided a mean total of 101 (SD = 19) utterances and children provided a mean total of 52 (SD = 14) utterances.

There was large variation in parents’ scores for the different types of talk during the observation. Descriptive statistics for the main parent talk measures are provided in Table 1. As can be seen in Table 1, even though we prompted for sound talk, parents predominantly made meaning-related comments during the interactions. Some parents never referred to sounds throughout the 6-minute interaction (M for total sound talk was 10.52; SD = 12.34; range = 0–47). All of the conversational measures were positively skewed except for parents’ semantic talk. Logarithmic transformations corrected the skewness for all other conversational variables prior to correlational analyses. Parents’ implicit, explicit, and rhyming sound talk was positively and statistically significantly intercorrelated, but their sound talk was not statistically correlated with their semantic or letter naming talk (see Table 2 for intercorrelations among parent talk variables). Their sound talk was statistically significantly negatively correlated with their counting talk. Thus, there were some parents who consistently used all types of sound talk, but those parents who engaged in a great deal of sound talk used less counting talk.

Table 1.

Means (and SDs) of parents’ utterance types in the sound talk task (N = 27).

Measure	Mean (SD)	Range
Implicit sounds	6.85 (10.27)	0–38
Explicit sounds	1.59 (2.17)	0–8
Rhyming	2.07 (2.89)	0–11
Letter naming	7.30 (6.43)	1–28
Counting	3.04 (3.40)	0–12
Semantic	44.37 (12.88)	18–79

Table 2.

Intercorrelations of parent talk variables (N = 27).

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1. Implicit	–
2. Explicit	.45*	–
3. Rhyming	.50**	.62**	–
4. Semantic	−.02	−.08	−.28	–
5. Letters	.12	.06	−.16	.48*	–
6. Counting	−.48*	−.45*	−.37	.36	.30	–

p < .05, **p < .01.

Note: Implicit = implicit sound talk; Explicit = explicit sound talk; Rhyming = rhyming talk; Letters = letter naming.

Descriptive statistics for children’s phonological awareness, language, and alphabetic knowledge measures are provided in Table 3. Children’s receptive and expressive language were statistically significantly correlated (r = .59, p = .001), as was their first sound and letter naming fluency (r = .44, p = .02). Their overall spoken language score was moderately but not statistically significantly correlated with phonological awareness in the form of first sound fluency (r = .35, p = .07).²

Table 3.

Means (and SDs) of children’s phonological awareness, language, and literacy measures (N = 27).

Measure	Mean (SD)	Range
Phonological awareness
DIBELS WP	7.04 (6.56)	0–18
DIBELS FSF	6.52 (8.33)	0–24
Language
TELD Receptive	116.33 (15.36)	76–134
TELD Expressive	101.26 (11.14)	76–124
TELD Total	110.44 (14.28)	71–131
Literacy
DIBELS LNF	12.11 (17.34)	0–48

Note: TELD = Test of Early Language Development; DIBELS WP = Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills: Word Parts; FSF = First Sound Fluency; LNF = Letter Naming Fluency.

Parents’ sound talk and children’s phonological awareness

The main aim of the study was to examine associations between these different types of parent talk and children’s phonological awareness. As shown in Table 4, parents’ implicit sound talk correlated positively and statistically significantly with both measures of children’s phonological awareness (word parts and first sound fluency), but neither parents’ explicit sound talk nor rhyming talk was statistically significantly correlated with children’s phonological awareness. Parents’ sound talk was not statistically significantly correlated with children’s language or alphabetic knowledge. A composite measure of parents’ total sound talk – comprised of their implicit, explicit, and rhyming talk – revealed similar patterns of non-significant correlations with children’s language (r = .27, n.s.) and alphabetic knowledge (r = .36, n.s.), but statistically significant positive correlations with children’s phonological awareness (r = .40, p = .04; and r = .48, p = .01 with word parts and first sound fluency, respectively).

Table 4.

Correlations between parents’ sound talk and children’s phonological awareness, language, and literacy scores (N = 27).

Measure	Implicit sounds	Explicit sounds	Rhyming	Counting	Letter naming	Semantics
Phonological awareness
DIBELS WP	.58**	.28	.27	−.54**	−.06	−.10
DIBELS FSF	.45*	.37	.13	−.47*	−.03	−.18
Language
Receptive	.12	.25	.02	−.43*	.17	−.23
Expressive	.34	.31	.07	−.18	.27	.11
Total	.24	.31	.05	−.37	.23	−.10
Literacy
DIBELS LNF	.26	.23	.29	−.49**	−.11	.04

p < .05, **p < .01.

Note: TELD = Test of Early Language Development; DIBELS WP = Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills: Word Parts; FSF = First Sound Fluency; LNF = Letter Naming Fluency.

There were no statistically significant positive correlations with children’s phonological awareness for other types of parental talk, such as letter naming, counting, or semantic utterances; in fact, parents’ counting talk was negatively correlated with both phonological awareness measures (see Table 4). Neither parents’ total talk nor children’s total talk was statistically significantly correlated with children’s language, phonological awareness, or alphabetic knowledge (for parents’ total talk, rs ranged from .01 to .32, n.s.; for children’s total talk, rs ranged from –.12 to .26, n.s.).

To better ascertain the specific role of the three types of parents’ sound talk in children’s phonological awareness, we used Fisher r-to-z tests for dependent correlations with the same participants (Steiger, 1980). These tests compared whether the relation between implicit sound talk and phonological awareness was statistically significantly stronger than the relations between other forms of parent talk and children’s phonological awareness (see Table 4). Statistically significant differences were found only when examining the relations between parent talk and the developmentally more advanced onset phoneme awareness task. Children’s first sound fluency was more strongly correlated with parents’ implicit sound talk than it was to parents’ rhyming talk, z = 3.41, p < .001, or semantic talk, z = 2.33, p = .02. First sound fluency was also more strongly correlated with explicit sound talk than with semantic talk, z = 1.93, p = .05, although the correlations of first sound fluency with rhyming talk and semantic talk did not differ statistically, z = .96, p = .33. Nor did the correlations differ between types of sound talk and children’s phonological awareness in the form of word parts.

Thus, positive relations with phonological awareness were observed between parents’ total sound talk and both aspects of children’s phonological awareness – their awareness of word parts as well as their awareness of onset phonemes. The link was especially strong between parents’ implicit sound talk and children’s onset phoneme awareness, such that children with higher onset phoneme awareness had parents who talked more about sounds in an implicit way in the observation. Explicit sound talk was also significantly stronger in the link to phonological awareness in comparison to parents’ semantic talk, although neither correlation reached statistical significance. Moreover, the correlations between implicit sound talk and both phonological awareness measures held even after controlling separately for maternal education, paternal occupation, parents’ and children’s total talk in the interaction, children’s age, alphabetic knowledge, receptive language, expressive language, and total spoken language (r_ps ranged from .39 to .59, all ps ≤ .05). The correlation between total sound talk and first sound fluency weakened when controlling separately for maternal education, paternal occupation, parents’ and children’s total talk in the interaction, children’s age, alphabetic knowledge, receptive language, expressive language, and total spoken language (r_ps ranged from .29 to .39, all ps ≤ .15), but all correlations between total sound talk and word parts remained significant (r_ps ranged from .43 to .55, all ps ≤ .05).

Discussion

Our main aim in this study was to explore aspects of parental speech that correlated with children’s phonological awareness. We devised a new analogue ‘Sound Talk’ task for parents and children for this purpose. Our main finding was a specific link between observed parents’ sound talk – particularly implicit sound talk – and children’s higher levels of phonological awareness, even after controlling for total talk, children’s spoken language, alphabetic knowledge, age, and important socioeconomic indicators. As found in previous studies (e.g., Lonigan et al., 1998), and in keeping with Metsala’s (1999) neighborhood density theory, children’s overall spoken language was positively correlated with their phonological awareness (r = .35), although due to our small sample size, that correlation was of marginal statistical significance. It is possible that parents who use more sound talk also use more of the high-quality speech that contributes to children’s vocabulary; thus, partialing out the variance in phonological awareness associated with children’s spoken language provided a fairly conservative control of the unique contribution of parents’ sound talk. We note that Hipfner-Boucher et al. (2014) found that children’s mastery of narrative structure contributed unique variance to children’s phonological awareness, even after controlling for children’s expressive vocabulary, so in future research, children’s narrative skill should also be taken into account.

To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first demonstration of a direct link between parental speech and children’s phonological awareness. Foy and Mann (2003) demonstrated that parents’ reports of children’s use of computer games and e-books were positively linked to children’s phonological awareness, but that study did not directly measure parent–child interactions. Other research assessing naturally occurring parental speech has isolated parents’ talk about letters and the sounds of letters to their preschoolers, but did not include other forms of parents’ sound talk, nor have they included corresponding measures of children’s phonological awareness (Robins et al., 2014). We acknowledge that our prompt and our stimuli for the ‘Sound Talk’ task may have elicited more sound talk from parents than they normally produce in everyday interactions; however, parents still displayed large individual differences in the quantity and type of sound talk in this analogue task, and they still talked about other aspects besides sounds in this interaction.

We note that parents who used more counting talk in this context had children with lower levels of phonological awareness, language, and letter knowledge. Counting talk does involve repetition of words, and even some rhyming, as in our example of a parent saying ‘one tree, two trees.’ Yet this kind of talk correlated negatively with children’s phonological awareness. Given that we prompted specifically for sound talk in the interaction, it is interesting that some parents gave no sound talk at all. It is possible that these parents felt their children would not understand their references to the sounds of the object labels, so instead talked about other aspects of the objects. Perhaps parents are more likely to talk about sounds with children who have higher levels of phonological awareness. It is also possible that these parents are not talking very often about sounds with their children in their everyday lives. Perhaps counting talk is a form of didactic talk with which they felt more comfortable than sound talk, or perhaps some parents prefer to focus more on numbers than on words in their interactions. We would like to explore these possibilities in future research in which we ask parents directly about their level of comfort when using different types of sound talk with their preschoolers.

In this sample of preschool children, it is of interest that parents’ implicit sound talk was especially strongly linked to children’s phonological awareness in the form of onset phoneme awareness. One feature of the implicit sound talk was its playful quality. When parents used this strategy, it was not in a ‘teaching’ tone of voice; instead, they adopted a playful, light tone to gently point out the sound features of the objects (e.g., Does the brown banana have a beak?). We suspect that the fun, playful nature of these comments is critical in the link to young children’s phonological awareness. This information should be useful in designing interventions to help parents enhance their preschool children’s phonological awareness. Playful, enjoyable activities for parent and child alike could be designed to help foster these skills (see Crosby, Rasinski, Padak, & Yildirim, 2014; Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2008). These activities could be book-centered, as in Korat et al.’s (2013) successful parent intervention with e-books and printed books for fostering Hebrew-speaking preschoolers’ phonological awareness. However, we note that all the types of sound talk we measured, including explicit and rhyming talk, are promising for inclusion in parent-led interventions. When a total sound talk variable was created, that variable was uniquely correlated with children’s phonological awareness in the form of word parts, even after controlling for sociodemographic variables and children’s skills. Because children’s phonological awareness is remarkably stable once children reach the primary school years, Lonigan et al. (2009) pointed to the early childhood period as a prime time for its development. Fortunately, phonological awareness is typically relatively amenable to intervention, even once children enter school (e.g., Bus & van IJzendoorn, 1999). We view parent-led and teacher-led interventions for phonological awareness as complementary activities in the preschool and early school years, with the common goal of strengthening children’s reading readiness.

Because this study was the first to explore links between parental speech and children’s phonological awareness, there were several limitations. Over 20% of the parents, mostly those with younger 3-year-olds, did not engage in the activity long enough to observe their sound talk, so future research should continue to explore a wider range of activities and props to elicit this kind of talk from parents. Our sample was also relatively homogeneous in terms of parents’ ethnicity and socioeconomic status, so we are not able to generalize to parents’ sound talk in other groups. This research should be extended to lower-income samples to ascertain whether the same range of individual differences in parents’ sound talk exists, especially given Lonigan et al.’s (2009) finding that lower-income children’s phonological awareness did not show the dramatic growth from 3 to 4 years evinced by the middle-income children. In future research, a longitudinal examination of parents’ sound talk in concert with children’s growth in phonological awareness over the preschool years would help clarify these connections over time. Our sample size was also small. However, despite that, the correlations between parents’ sound talk and children’s phonological awareness were of moderate effect sizes, and distinct to phonological awareness as predicted. The results are thus promising for understanding the origins of phonological awareness in the preschool years, and for designing interventions with parents to promote preschool children’s phonological awareness in enjoyable ways.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank the families who participated in this research and the children’s librarians at the Dunedin City Library.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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