The Relation Between Parents’ Abstract Questions, Children’s Responses, and Narrative Ability

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Listening to What Children Say: Narratives in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Preschool children’s ability to talk about abstract topics such as drawing inferences or past events predicts preschool oral language skills and subsequent elementary school reading comprehension. One way in which children are first exposed to abstract language is by hearing and responding to parents’ abstract questions during book reading. The current study describes the abstractness of parents’ questions and the frequency, syntactic complexity, and appropriateness of children’s responses, as well as the relation between children’s responses and a narrative ability measure. Results indicated that more abstract questions elicited both more frequent and more complex responses from children. Additionally, children who gave more appropriate responses to abstract questions also demonstrated better narrative abilities.

Authors

• Kathryn Leech, University of Maryland - College Park

• Meredith Rowe, Harvard University