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Poster #184 - What You Say and How You Say It: Vocabulary and Communication Skills Predict School Functioning

Thu, March 21, 9:30 to 10:45am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Language skills support children’s school readiness, predicting later self-regulation and academic success (e.g., Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999; Dickinson, 2011). Although vocabulary is often emphasized in the developmental literature, the ability to use language appropriately in social situations, or communication skills, is also crucial (Bryant, 2005; Rudasill, Rimm-Kaufman, Justice, & Pence, 2006). In fact, 84% of kindergarten teachers surveyed by the National Center for Education Statistics emphasized the importance of children’s abilities to articulate their wants, needs, and thoughts as crucial to adaptive school adjustment (Blair, 2002). Yet the extent to which communication skills and vocabulary independently predict school outcomes is not known.

The current study examined the contributions of children’s vocabulary and communication skills to two aspects of school functioning: self-regulation (executive functions, learning engagement) and academic performance (reading, math). We examined whether the level of vocabulary and communication skills children had at the start of the prekindergarten year, along with their growth in vocabulary and communication skills over the course of the prekindergarten year contributed to school functioning at the end of kindergarten.

Participants were 164 children (14% Latinx, 30% African American, 56% European American; 57% girls) who were randomly assigned to the control group of a larger Head Start intervention study. At the start of the study, participants were 4.59 years old (SDage = .30). Measures were collected at the start of the preschool, end of preschool, and end of kindergarten, and consisted of teacher ratings of children and assessments conducted by research assistants. Analyses were conducted in a two-stage modeling approach. First, growth curve analyses were conducted to examine change in vocabulary and communication skills from the start of preschool to end of kindergarten. Growth curves revealed significant linear and quadratic change in both vocabulary and communication skills (see Table 1). Next, intercepts and slopes from individual growth curves of vocabulary and communication skills were extracted and used to predict reading, math, executive functions, and learning engagement at the end of kindergarten in regression models. Child age, gender, family socioeconomic status, and children’s scores on outcomes at the start of preschool were entered as covariates.

Results from regression models are summarized in Table 2. In terms of academic performance, initial levels of prekindergarten vocabulary and communication skills, as well as growth in vocabulary and communication skills significantly predicted better performance in both reading and math assessments (ps < .05). For self-regulation skills, different patterns emerged. Children’s initial communication skills, and growth in communication skills significantly predicted better performance on both executive functions tasks and learning engagement. In addition, initial levels of vocabulary uniquely predicted executive function skills.
Implications for language and school interventions are discussed. In particular, we discuss the importance of considering relative contributions of different aspects of language in research. In addition, we discuss how communication skills in particular may afford children with unique social opportunities in school that enhance learning, and recommend that strategies to build children’s communication skills in preschool receive more attention in early interventions to promote school readiness.

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