A developmental model of antisocial behavior is outlined. Recent findings are reviewed that concern the etiology and course of antisocial behavior from early childhood through adolescence. Evidence is presented in support of the hypothesis that the route to chronic delinquency is marked by a reliable developmental sequence of experiences. As a first step, ineffective parenting practices are viewed as determinants for childhood conduct disorders. The general model also takes into account the contextual variables that influence the family interaction process. As a second step, the conduct-disordered behaviors lead to academic failure and peer rejection. These dual failures lead, in turn, to increased risk for depressed mood and involvement in a deviant peer group. This third step usually occurs during later childhood and early adolescence. It is assumed that children following this developmental sequence are at high risk for engaging in chronic delinquent behavior. Finally, implications for prevention and intervention are discussed.

We experimentally assessed a 1-month, home-based intervention, designed to optimize parental reading of picture books to young children. Parents in the experimental group received instructions to increase their rates of open-ended questions, function/attribute questions, and expansions; to respond appropriately to children's attempts to answer these questions; and to decrease their frequency of straight reading and questions that could be answered by pointing. Control-group parents were instructed to read in their customary fashion. All families audiotaped their reading sessions at home. Analysis of these tapes demonstrated that the experimental-group parents complied with the intervention instructions. Children in the experimental group scored significantly higher than children in the control group on standardized posttests of expressive language ability. On the basis of analysis of audiotapes, children in the experimental group also had a higher mean length of utterance (MLU), a higher frequency of phrases, and a lower frequency of single words. Follow-up 9 months after the completion of treatment disclosed continued, although statistically diminished, differences between the two groups.Picture book story time offers a potentially rich opportunity for young children to learn language. Wells (1985a) found that approximately 5% of the daily speech of a sample of 24-montholds occurred in story-time settings. In addition to being a setting in which children are prone to talk, story time also appears to evoke tutorial behavior from mothers that varies across dimensions such as social class. Ninio and Bruner (1978) studied a single middle-class mother-child pair over a 10-month period, with no special instructions given with regard to book reading. The mother labeled objects most frequently during picture book reading, with 75.6% of all instances of labeling occurring in that context. In addition, the mother provided consistent and informative feedback for the child's attempts at labeling (all incorrect labels were corrected, and 81% of the child's correct labels were reinforced). Similar effects have been found in case studies by Snow and Goldfield (1983) and Moerk and Moerk (1979). Ninio (1980) examined social class differences and found that lower-class mothers were less likely than middle-class mothers to engage in a number of potentially instructive behaviors during story time. Correspondingly, lowerclass children had smaller productive vocabularies than middle-class children.As one might expect, the focus of the speech that parents direct to their children (child-directed speech) during picture book reading changes with the age and linguistic sophistication

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The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between joint picture-book-reading experiences provided in the home and children's early oral language skills. Subjects were 41 two-year-old children and their mothers. Measures included maternal report of the age at which she began to read to the child, the frequency of home reading sessions, the number of stories read per week, and the frequency of visits by the child to the local library. Measures of language skill used were the child's receptive and expressive scores on the revised Reynell Developmental Language Scales. Multiple regression analyses indicated that picture-book reading exposure was more strongly related to receptive than to expressive language. Age of onset of home reading routines was the most important predictor of oral language skills. Directions of effect, the importance of parental beliefs as determinants of home reading practices, and the possible existence of a threshold level for reading frequency are discussed.

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