Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Promoting Toddlers' Language Development Through Community-Based Intervention
Section snippets
Community Context
The setting of the study was Seattle, Washington. Compared with the state and nation as whole, Seattle's residents are on average well educated. More than 86% of adults more than 25 years of age have completed high school, and 38% have a 4-year college degree. Although many enjoy a comfortable income, at the time of this study, 16.5% of the children less than 6 years of age lived in poverty (City of Seattle, 1992). At the last decennial census, in 1990, there were more than 7000 births to city
Sociodemographics
Family sociodemographics and characteristics of the study children are presented in Table 2, Table 3. Similar to the city as a whole, most mothers (81%) were white. The largest minority group to participate in the study was of African American mothers (12%), the next largest was Asian (3%). Mothers' average age was 34 years. Most (88%) were living with a spouse or partner. It was not uncommon for households to include extended family and unrelated adults; 10% of households had three or more
Discussion
This study tested the usefulness of a simple and effective shared reading method that helps facilitate young children's language development. Dialogic reading, as modified here, led to favorable changes in parent–child reading style, in children's language use during reading, and as measured by a standardized test of expressive language skill. These findings encourage further dissemination and evaluation of the dialogic-reading method within other programs for parents and their “pre”
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted while the author was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington and was supported by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Major support for this study was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through grants to Kathryn E. Barnard under whose mentorship this work was completed.
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Effects of training parents in dialogic book‐sharing: The Early‐Years Provision in Children's Centers (EPICC) study
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