It is widely believed that reading to preschool children promotes their language and literacy skills. Yet, whether early parent-child book reading is an index of generally rich linguistic input or a unique predictor of later outcomes remains unclear. To address this question, we asked whether naturally occurring parent-child book reading interactions between 1 and 2.5 years-of-age predict elementary school language and literacy outcomes, controlling for the quantity of other talk parents provide their children, family socioeconomic status, and children's own early language skill. We find that the quantity of parent-child book reading interactions predicts children's later receptive vocabulary, reading comprehension, and internal motivation to read (but not decoding, external motivation to read, or math skill), controlling for these other factors. Importantly, we also find that parent language that occurs during book reading interactions is more sophisticated than parent language outside book reading interactions in terms of vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity. K E Y W O R D Sbook reading, language, language input, literacy † This work was completed while at the University of Chicago.

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk--talk about non-present events, explanations, or pretend-at 30 months predicts 7 th -grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension.Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualized talk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomes remains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of child talk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of 7 th -grade AL proficiency, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, and child syntactic comprehension.

Low socioeconomic status (SES) has been repeatedly linked with decreased academic achievement, including lower reading outcomes. Some lower SES children do show skills and scores commensurate with those of their higher SES peers, but whether their abilities stem from the same systems as high SES children or are based on divergent strategies is unknown. We here investigated a potential interactive relationship between SES and real-word reading skill in the white matter in 42 typically developing children. SES was determined based on parental education; reading skill and age were not significantly related to SES. There was a significant neural interaction: Clusters in the bilateral inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF), left superior longitudinal fasciculus, and left corticospinal tract demonstrated interactive skill–SES relationships in fractional anisotropy. Follow-up analyses demonstrated that higher SES children showed a positive relationship between fractional anisotropy, reflecting tract coherence, and reading skill in left hemisphere tract clusters, whereas lower SES children showed a positive relationship in the right hemisphere homologues. Broadly, the ILF has been demonstrated to support orthographic skill on the left and more general visuospatial processing on the right, so high reading achievement in lower SES children may rely on supplementary visuospatial processing more than for higher SES readers. This pattern is consistent with previous work reporting low SES children’s environments to include less rich verbal experience, which may lead them to disproportionately draw on visuospatial skills for success. Further, these results indicate that group SES differences may be best described by an adaptive, not a deficit, model.