Werker – predicting later language and literacy

One of the most important questions in the field of language acquisition is whether we can predict from early language development, later language skill. So can we identify in infancy, toddlerhood or the early school years, the child who’s later going to have difficulties speaking, reading, spelling with some more complex use of language. If we could identify, reliably, those children who are developing well, those children who need just a little bit of a push to achieve their potential, and those children who need more specific targeted intervention and just what that intervention is, I think we would all feel that our work on basic language acquisition had been able to make a difference in children who may not be developing so well. And there is an enormous amount of work showing continuity in some realms of language acquisition from early to later years.      

So, for example, there are the studies, the Hart and Risley study showing that the richness of the vocabulary input that the child hears in the toddler years predicts the size of their vocabulary. There are a number of studies showing that phonological awareness, so children’s ability to rhyme, to show alliteration, and that’s recognizing the same sounds at the beginning of words, to count the number of syllables in a word or the number of phonemes, the word cat, for example, has three phonemes c-a-t; those kinds of phonological awareness skills at three and four, predict reading readiness very well. And there are a number of researchers around the world, including in Canada, who have shown that if you go into a kindergarten or grade one classroom and identify the children who do not have good phonological awareness skills, or simply introduce an across-the-board program for all children, with little games to facilitate phonological awareness, that the number of reading problems decreases significantly.  

So knowledge of the properties of sound of words is useful in translating between listening and reading. And using, sort of, the orthography to map sounds to letters. There’s no question about that. So that’s some work that shows a relationship between early language acquisition and later literacy.  

There’s also work on the pragmatics of interacting with children. Children whose parents read to them, just open a book, turn the pages, those children have a more positive approach to learning how to read and are more successful when they start school.  

A focus of my work and the work of a number of other infancy researchers now, is to try and reach down into infancy and to see if some of the pre-language skills that emerge in perception of language, in simple associative word learning and even in things like the quickness with which you can recognize a familiar word in the first couple of years of life; whether those will predict later language skills and later literacy. I can tell you that we’re working on these questions and that the results to date look very promising. There are a number of other labs around world, also working on these questions and it’s kind of exciting that infants’ speech perception and early word learning research has reached the level of maturity where we have stable enough findings about the descriptive aspects of typical language development in the infancy period to be able to use these milestones we’ve identified in infancy to see if children who are not achieving these milestones at the same age as other children or as successfully as other children are those children for whom early intervention could be very effective.