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Developmental Psychology 2013, Vol. 49, No. 4, 665– 671

© 2012 American Psychological Association 0012-1649/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0028612

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Phonological Skills and Vocabulary Knowledge Mediate Socioeconomic Status Effects in Predicting Reading Outcomes for Chinese Children Yuping Zhang

Twila Tardif

Beijing Normal University

University of Michigan

Hua Shu, Hong Li, and Hongyun Liu

Catherine McBride-Chang

Beijing Normal University

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Weilan Liang and Zhixiang Zhang Peking University First Hospital This study examined the relations among socioeconomic status (SES), early phonological processing, vocabulary, and reading in 262 children from diverse SES backgrounds followed from ages 4 to 9 in Beijing, China. SES contributed to variations in phonological skills and vocabulary in children’s early development. Nonetheless, early phonological and vocabulary abilities exerted equally strong and independent mediation of the SES effects on children’s reading achievement by the end of 3rd grade for this Chinese sample. These findings not only replicate studies in alphabetic languages but, because of their longitudinal nature, also demonstrate the potential for interventions focused on improving children’s early language skills, and at which ages these factors may have the greatest impact. Keywords: SES, phonology, vocabulary, Chinese reading

we know that language is greatly affected by differences in parental SES (Hart & Risley, 1995; Noble et al., 2007; Noble, Wolmetz, Ochs, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006), we have very little understanding of how this might apply across languages and cultures other than English. A highly verbal and emotionally stable family environment greatly benefits both vocabulary and reading (Hart et al., 2009; Shu, Li, Anderson, Ku, & Yue, 2002). In English, SES also influences children’s vocabulary size (Hoff, 2003). Several variables have also been shown to mediate the relationship between SES and vocabulary, including the surrounding literacy environment and the ways in which parents talk with their children as well as factors such as the quantity and quality of parent– child gestures and early phonological abilities (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Phonological skills, in particular, have been implicated as important predictors of children’s reading performance (e.g., Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony, & Barker, 1998). In addition, studies have also reported strong correlations between phonological and vocabulary abilities (e.g., Noble, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006). However, few studies have considered the complex relations among SES, vocabulary, phonology, and reading, nor have they addressed how these factors might interact in development (Bowey, 1995; Noble, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006). To test the “phonological deficit” hypothesis in reading, particularly for low SES children, and to disentangle the relations among SES variability, phonological abilities, vocabulary, and reading,

Socioeconomic status (SES) has long been recognized as an important predictor of children’s school performance. Recently, it has also been identified as a causal factor in poor social, cognitive, and physical health outcomes, and as influencing specialization of the brain’s left hemisphere for language (Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007; Raizada, Richards, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 2008). And yet, both the social and cognitive mechanisms by which these SES differences appear are complex and not well understood. Although

This article was published Online First May 21, 2012. Yuping Zhang, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Twila Tardif, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan; Hua Shu, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University; Hong Li and Hongyun Li, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University; Catherine McBride-Chang, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; Weilan Liang and Zhixiang Zhang, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, China. This research was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council #2120298, awarded to Catherine McBride-Chang, and by Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 30870758, awarded to Hua Shu, as well as U.S. Natural Sciences Foundation Grant BCS-0350272, awarded to Twila Tardif. We thank all participating children and parents. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hua Shu, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, 19th, Xinjiekouwai Street, 100875, Beijing, China. E-mail: [email protected] 665


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data that examines children’s SES backgrounds, phonological abilities, and vocabulary knowledge in a longitudinal design beginning with measures before the onset of reading from nonalphabetic languages are clearly needed. In the present study, we examined 262 Chinese children’s reading skills (at age 9) as a function of both SES and individual differences in phonological and vocabulary development from age 4 through age 5. A major virtue of this prospective longitudinal design is that we were able to examine the hypothesis that SES is related to developing phonological abilities even for a language that does not abide by the “alphabetic principle” (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989); with this design, we could also carefully consider the joint roles of vocabulary and phonological processing for reading before obvious differences in reading achievement had taken place. Moreover, we were able to do this in a society that is presently undergoing rapid sociological change and in the context of an almost universal preschool through sixth grade education (UNICEF, 2008). The first question for the present study was how SES is related to both vocabulary and phonological abilities at children’s ages 4 and 5. In samples of American children or other children from economically advantaged Western societies, SES differences or relative disadvantages in socioeconomic status confer large differences in phonological awareness and vocabulary skills, even in the preschool years (e.g., Farkas & Beron, 2004), and these differences persist into word-level reading abilities in the school aged years. However, the United States is a society in which educational attainment holds a certain amount of stability across generations, with correlations approaching .31 between the educational levels of parents and their children (Schlee, Mullis, & Shriner, 2009), and .62 between mothers and fathers (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Income, moreover, is highly related to education in America, with correlations that range from .44 to .84 (Hollingshead, 1975; Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). The case for China is, arguably, much different given the rapid social and economic changes that have been occurring for the past 30 years and that directly followed a period of unprecedented disruption in educational and occupational opportunities during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 (Sato & Shi, 2007). In addition, there are differences in the extent to which preschool education actually reaches young children who come from families with different educational backgrounds (e.g., Mistry, Biesanz, Chien, Howes, & Benner, 2008). In the United States, approximately 55% of children aged 3–5 years old are enrolled in some form of preschool education (Adema, del Carmen Huerta, Panzera, Thevenon, & Pearson, 2009), whereas in the city of Beijing, at the time this study was conducted, 82.3% of children were enrolled in some form of preschool (Luo, 2010), including 100% of our sample. There are reasons specific to the languages, as well, that might cause one to question whether reading capabilities in Chinese ought to be related to the standard predictors for reading in English (e.g., McBride-Chang et al., 2005) as well as to whether these standard predictors ought to be related to SES. With respect to the first issue, despite early studies arguing that Chinese reading abilities were achieved largely independent of phonological skills (Huang & Hanley, 1995), the great majority of studies have found that character/word recognition by Chinese children is highly related to phonological awareness, both at the syllable and the phoneme level (e.g., Ho & Bryant, 1997). Nonetheless, the nature

and importance of each of these levels changes from preschool through the early school years (Ho & Bryant, 1997; Newman, Tardif, Huang, & Shu, 2011). However, it is still unclear how SES interacts with phonological abilities and contributes to Chinese character recognition and whether phonological awareness mediates the relationship between SES and reading. In addition, given that there is not a strict “alphabetic principle” in Chinese and that the morphemic level of representation is relatively important for Chinese literacy (e.g., Shu, McBride-Chang, Wu, & Liu, 2006), vocabulary skills might play a particularly important role in Chinese character reading. Thus, it is not straightforward as to whether SES would influence reading in Chinese or, even if it does, whether this relationship might be mediated by phonological abilities, vocabulary, or both. To answer these questions and to examine the nature of the relations among SES, phonological abilities, and vocabulary knowledge in the prediction of reading, we applied structural equation modeling (SEM) to a longitudinal sample of Chinese children from a diverse set of socioeconomic backgrounds, tested for prereading and reading skills from age 4 to age 9 years.

Method Participants Three hundred thirty-eight children were recruited from the longitudinal follow-up of a norming study of the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (CCDI; Tardif, Fletcher, Zhang, Liang, & Zuo, 2008) recruited from maternal-child health care clinics in Beijing, China. All children were native Mandarin speakers with normal IQ, with no reported mental, physical, or sensory difficulties on their health care records. The attrition rate has remained low, with 293 from the initial sample continuing to participate in the project. The present study reports on phonological and vocabulary predictors measured at ages 4 and 5 years old and reading skills at age 9 for the 262 children (119 girls, 143 boys) who were in the same grade (Grade 3) at time of testing. The subsample of 262 children came from families representing a variety of SES levels in Beijing and was comparable with the overall sample of 293 children. All of these children were tested annually on a variety of tasks as part of a large longitudinal study. The present article focuses only on the prereading skills found most relevant to SES and later reading abilities in Western samples and includes children with complete data at each of these ages, with the ages at which each task was administered shown in Table 1.

Measures and Procedure Chinese character recognition. This test consisted of 150 single Chinese characters, selected from grade-level texts and tested when children were 9 years old. Children were asked to read from the beginning to the end of the list at their own pace, with self-corrections and guessing allowed. An almost identical task was successfully used in previous studies (e.g., Li, Shu, McBrideChang, Liu, & Peng, in press) with an average score for 9-yearolds of 93.63 (SD ⫽ 19.56).

SES AND CHINESE READING DEVELOPMENT

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Table 1 Means, Standard Deviations, Range, and Reliability for All Measures Variable Mother’s education level (7) Father’s education level (7) Mother’s income level (6) Father’s income level (6) Nonword repetition (24) Syllable deletion (15)


Vocabulary definition (64) Chinese character recognition (150)

Test time (age in months)

M

SD

Range

Cronbach’s ␣

Age 3 (40) Age 3 (40) Age 3 (40) Age 3 (40) Age 4 (53) Age 5 (65) Age 4 (53) Age 5 (65) Age 4 (53) Age 5 (65) Age 9 (113)

4.58 4.72 3.12 3.90 16.47 19.05 8.18 11.94 6.18 8.02 101.94

1.01 1.08 1.37 1.07 4.31 3.54 4.80 3.05 3.72 4.04 17.16

1–7 3–7 1–5 1–6 0–24 0–24 0–15 0–15 0–20 0–19 29–133

— — — — .80 .77 .93 .85 .60 .69 .95

Note. N ⫽ 262. Two children failed to participate in age 4 and age 5 vocabulary testing. Scores in parentheses indicate the maximum score for each measure. Dashes indicate that data were not available.

Phonological Measures Two tests of phonological awareness in the absence of print presence were used in this study: Nonword Repetition and Syllable Deletion. Each of these tests has been used in other studies of Chinese children and has been described in articles in which reading outcomes for younger children were outlined (Lei et al., 2011; McBride-Chang et al., 2008). Nonword repetition. This test has been successfully used in a previous study in which predictors of reading for Chinese children have been examined (Lei et al., 2011) and was modeled after nonword repetition tasks in English and other languages. In this test, children were required to repeat auditorily presented one-, two-, three-, and four-syllable nonwords, with six words at each syllable length conforming to phonotactic properties of standard Mandarin, balanced carefully for onset, rime, and tone both across and within syllable lengths. For consistency of presentation, these stimuli were prerecorded by a native Mandarin speaker and presented via tape recorder. Testing ended if the child made mistakes on four of the six words presented with two or three syllables. The whole task consisted of two practice trials and 24 experimental trials and was tested throughout the period from age 4 to age 5 years. Syllable deletion. In this test, children were required to delete a target syllable from orally presented two- or three-syllable words. The remaining syllables, after deletion, could form either a word or a nonword. For example, /zı`xıńgche៮ / (bicycle) without /zı`/ would be /xıńgche៮ /, which is a nonword, whereas /hońglù¨de៮ ng/ (traffic light) without /lù¨/ would be /hońgde៮ ng/ (red light), a real word. This task has been successfully used in several other studies of Chinese children (Lei et al., 2011; Shu, Peng, & McBrideChang, 2008) and is modeled after syllable deletion tasks used widely in English and other languages (e.g., Woodcock-Johnson test; Woodcock, 1987). The test consisted of two practice trials and 15 experimental trials and was performed when the children were 4 and 5 years old. As is clear from the above descriptions, two different measures were used at each age selected to be maximally sensitive to individual differences (see Table 1). Because the measures are moderately correlated at each age, and we were interested in children’s underlying phonological abilities and not particular sub-

sets of these skills, a composite phonological score was developed by normalizing each measure and then averaging the two measures at each age for all further analyses.

Vocabulary Measures Vocabulary definitions. This task was adapted from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale vocabulary subtest (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986) and has been successfully used in previous studies to measure vocabulary knowledge, as opposed to intelligence per se (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; Ouellette, 2006). Children were asked to orally explain concepts and objects of increasing conceptual difficulty, with 32 experiment trials (scored from 0 to 2 points) in total. Testing stopped if a child failed on five consecutive questions. The measure was used at ages 4 and 5 years old. Scores on the Vocabulary Definition task were also normalized in all further analyses.

SES Index Parents were administered a background questionnaire including both parents’ income and education levels to develop an SES indicator measure based on a combination of these factors (e.g., Noble, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006). Parental income was measured with a 6-point scale, with 1 ⫽ less than 300, 2 ⫽ between 300 and 499, 3 ⫽ between 500 and 999, 4 ⫽ between 1,000 and 1,999, 5 ⫽ between 2,000 and 8,999, 6 ⫽ more than 9,000 Chinese renminbi (RMB) per month. Parental education was measured with a 7-point scale such that 1 ⫽ primary grade 3 or below, 2 ⫽ primary grade 4 to 6, 3 ⫽ middle school, 4 ⫽ high school, 5 ⫽ junior college, 6 ⫽ university, 7 ⫽ postgraduate. In the present sample, average educations and incomes are presented in Table 1. Mothers’ modal and mothers’ and fathers’ median education was high school, and fathers’ modal education was junior college. Median and modal income for both mothers and fathers was between 1,000 and 1,999 RMB per month, approximating the average monthly income (1,148 RMB ⫽ approximately US$143.50 using 2000 conversion rates) in Beijing at that time (Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2000). As with previous reports on indicators of SES, these measures were highly

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Table 2 Correlations Between SES Measures, Early Phonological Ability, Vocabulary Knowledge, and Reading


Variable 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Mother’s education Father’s education Mother income Father income SES index Age 4 Nonword Repetition Age 4 Syllable Deletion Age 4 PA index Age 5 Nonword Repetition Age 5 Syllable Deletion Age 5 PA index Age 3 receptive vocabulary Age 4 vocabulary definition Age 5 vocabulary definition Age 9 Chinese character recognition

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

— .66ⴱⴱⴱ .46ⴱⴱⴱ .20ⴱⴱ .78ⴱⴱⴱ .17ⴱⴱ .27ⴱⴱⴱ .27ⴱⴱⴱ .24ⴱⴱⴱ .25ⴱⴱⴱ .32ⴱⴱⴱ .35ⴱⴱⴱ .32ⴱⴱⴱ .31ⴱⴱⴱ .19ⴱⴱⴱ

— .34ⴱⴱ .26ⴱⴱ .76ⴱⴱⴱ .09 .25ⴱⴱⴱ .21ⴱⴱ .18ⴱⴱ .26ⴱⴱⴱ .28ⴱⴱⴱ .29ⴱⴱⴱ .28ⴱⴱⴱ .25ⴱⴱⴱ .14ⴱ

— .36ⴱⴱⴱ .74ⴱⴱⴱ .10 .11 .13ⴱ .12 .19ⴱⴱ .20ⴱⴱ .22ⴱⴱⴱ .21ⴱⴱ .23ⴱⴱⴱ .15ⴱ

— .61ⴱⴱ .05 .18ⴱⴱ .14ⴱ .10 .16ⴱ .17ⴱⴱ .13ⴱ .14ⴱ .14ⴱ .05

— .14ⴱ .27ⴱⴱⴱ .25ⴱⴱⴱ .21ⴱⴱ .28ⴱⴱⴱ .31ⴱⴱⴱ .33ⴱⴱⴱ .30ⴱⴱⴱ .30ⴱⴱⴱ .17ⴱⴱ

— .36ⴱⴱⴱ .83ⴱⴱⴱ .43ⴱⴱⴱ .30ⴱⴱⴱ .46ⴱⴱⴱ .21ⴱⴱⴱ .25ⴱⴱⴱ .18ⴱⴱ .22ⴱⴱⴱ

— .83ⴱⴱⴱ .11 .58ⴱⴱⴱ .44ⴱⴱⴱ .28ⴱⴱⴱ .32ⴱⴱⴱ .32ⴱⴱⴱ .33ⴱⴱⴱ

— .33ⴱⴱⴱ .54ⴱⴱⴱ .55ⴱⴱⴱ .30ⴱⴱⴱ .35ⴱⴱⴱ .30ⴱⴱⴱ .33ⴱⴱⴱ

— .23ⴱⴱⴱ .79ⴱⴱⴱ .15ⴱ .17ⴱⴱ .09 .24ⴱⴱⴱ

— .79ⴱⴱⴱ .28ⴱⴱⴱ .31ⴱⴱⴱ .33ⴱⴱⴱ .35ⴱⴱⴱ

11

12

13

14

15

— .27ⴱⴱⴱ — .30ⴱⴱⴱ .40ⴱⴱⴱ — .27ⴱⴱⴱ .39ⴱⴱⴱ .59ⴱⴱⴱ — .38ⴱⴱⴱ .30ⴱⴱⴱ .33ⴱⴱⴱ .28ⴱⴱⴱ —

Note. SES ⫽ socioeconomic status; PA ⫽ phonological ability. ⴱ p ⬍ .05. ⴱⴱ p ⬍ .01. ⴱⴱⴱ p ⬍ .001.

correlated (see Table 2) and were thus transformed into z scores for each measure and combined to form a composite SES score across parents and across measurements of income and education.

Results Descriptive Statistics Table 1 presents means, standard deviations, range, and the internal consistency of all measures used in this study. Measures for phonology, vocabulary knowledge, and reading showed good reliabilities (ranged from .60 to .95), and obvious increases with age were observed in nonword repetition, syllable deletion, and vocabulary definition as well, with no floor or ceiling effects observed.

Untangling the Contributions of SES to Phonological and Vocabulary Development Table 2 describes the simple correlations among all our measurements, including SES, phonological, vocabulary, and reading variables. Significant correlations were found across measures. Specifically, correlation coefficients between SES and vocabulary remained consistent for both ages (r ⫽ .30), whereas the relations between SES and phonological abilities showed a trend toward an increase with age (i.e., r ⫽ .25 at age 4, r ⫽ .31 at age 5). Nonetheless, the phonological and vocabulary measures were also significantly correlated, and thus it is not clear whether or how these might be causally related in development.

Mediation Effects of Phonological Skills/Vocabulary for Relations Between SES and Reading To begin to examine the nature of the combined influences of SES, phonological, and vocabulary skills on children’s reading, we present, first, a direct model (see Figure 1A) that represents a correlation between early childhood SES and reading skills at age 9 (r ⫽ .17, p ⬍ .01) and then a combined model (see Figure 1B)

examining the potential effects of SES together with both phonology and vocabulary as mediators of the SES and reading relationship. We know from the simple correlations that in addition to reading of characters at age 9, early childhood SES is also related to early phonological and vocabulary skills. However, we do not know whether either phonological or vocabulary abilities, which are themselves correlated, mediate the relation between SES and reading, nor do we know whether these factors overlap or exert independent effects. In order to clarify these questions, we entered both variables as mediators into a single mediation model (see Figure 1). Once this was done, the direct effect (␤ ⫽ ⫺.07) from SES to Chinese character recognition was no longer significant, whereas both indirect effects through phonology and vocabulary were significant and comparable with each other (␤ ⫽ .38 and .23, respectively). Nonetheless, SES continued to show a significant contribution to phonology and vocabulary (␤ ⫽ .38 and .38, respectively), even though it no longer contributed directly to reading at age 9. Overall, the model showed excellent goodness of fit, ␹2(5, N ⫽ 262) ⫽ 4.73, p ⫽ .450, comparative fit index (CFI) ⫽ 1.000, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ⫽ 1.001, root-meansquare error of approximation (RMSEA) ⫽ .000 (90% CI [.000, .084]), and explained 26.7% of the variance in Chinese character recognition at age 9, compared with about 18% of the variance explained when either vocabulary or phonology was included as the sole mediator. Although this is not as high a percentage of variance as that reported in the English-speaking American samples in studies by Noble, Farah, and McCandliss (2006) (which ranged from .45 to .49 separately for nonword reading, single word reading, and passage comprehension), these previous studies in English did not use SEM; thus, the actual percentage of variance accounted for across models is not directly comparable. Moreover, the present results demonstrate a number of important points. First, early childhood SES has clear effects on early vocabulary and phonological processing skills in Chinese children. However, it does not exert a direct effect on reading independent of those skills. Thus, not only do phonology and vocabulary skills mediate


669

A Age 9 Chinese character recognition

SES .17**

B Age 5 phonology

Age 4 phonology

.77


.72

Early phonology

.38***

.38***

.45***

-.07 n.s.

SES .38***

.23*

Early vocabulary .78 Age 4 vocabulary

Age 9 Chinese character recognition

.57

Age 5 vocabulary

Figure 1. A: The relationship between SES and reading. B: Early phonology and vocabulary mediate the relationship between SES and reading. SES ⫽ socioeconomic status. ⴱ p ⬍ .05. ⴱⴱ p ⬍ .01. ⴱⴱⴱ p ⬍ .001.

the relationship between SES and reading, but they do so independently and additively.

Discussion We found in the present study of 262 Chinese children that early childhood SES showed a strong relationship with children’s phonological and vocabulary skills over time. More importantly, however, early phonological and vocabulary abilities were found to mediate the SES effect on Chinese children’s reading achievement by the end of third grade. Furthermore, both phonology and vocabulary at preschool ages, although correlated, were found to exert equally strong and additive mediation effects. Our results add to previous reports of increased effects of SES in shaping children’s phonological development during the preschool years (e.g., Burgess, 2002), this time in a nonalphabetic language (i.e., Chinese). Thus, even in a society where there has been enormous social change, and in which education and incomes have changed dramatically over the past two generations, SES has pervasive effects. In China, as in the United States, it is possible that these effects operate indirectly through increased amounts of child-directed speech, richer vocabularies, and literacy-related strategies in daily communications in higher SES families, and thereby contribute to how SES gets into the brain and onto the page to affect children’s reading skills (Hart et al., 2009; Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Although several studies have pointed to the importance of phonological abilities for learning to read (e.g., Shu et al., 2008), as well as the importance of vocabulary in mediating the relation-

ship between SES and children’s reading (Farkas & Beron, 2004; Hart et al., 2009), the present study was the first to explore the indirect effects of SES on reading through both phonology and vocabulary in a Chinese sample. Our results suggest that for Chinese and perhaps for other languages as well, early vocabulary is as strong a mediator as phonology. Thus, our results emphasize the fact that children’s word recognition not only requires strong connections between orthography and phonology but also requires mastery of orthographic and semantic correspondences, as well as semantic and phonological correspondences, as evidenced by the strong and sustained correlations between our phonological and vocabulary measures. Though it is possible that vocabulary skills might have a stronger impact on reading in Chinese than in alphabetic languages because the Chinese orthography contains much more semantic transparency, it is also possible that the relationship between vocabulary and reading is universal. Alternatively, the relationship between early vocabulary abilities and reading might not show the same consistency across the preschool and early school years. In either case, this is an empirically testable issue, and one that is worthy of further research in both alphabetic and nonalphabetic orthographies. Importantly, testing this requires similar longitudinal databases, including multiple measures in both the preschool and early school years. To summarize, the present study confirmed the importance of family SES as an important factor driving children’s language and reading skills, but through indirect rather than direct effects on reading. Moreover, these results also provide a window into how interventions focused on both phonological and vocabulary skills

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might lead to successful reading outcomes. Nonetheless, SES is a relatively blunt barometer of a child’s home literacy environment, especially when measured at a single point in time. Ultimately, more precise measures about specific practices that foster the developmental of vocabulary and phonological skills and, ultimately, reading will also lead to a better understanding of how to apply given interventions at appropriately timed windows of development.


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Received March 3, 2011 Revision received April 11, 2012 Accepted April 13, 2012 䡲

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