5. Language 0-7: The transition to literacy

Language 0-7: The transition to literacy

Pre-school oral language abilities are a key predictor of children’s literacy development 1,2,3, and recognition of this has driven campaigns to promote language skills in early years to improve children’s school-readiness 4,5.

In this work package, we followed the Language 0-5 cohort for a further two years, collecting a variety of transition-to-literacy behavioural measures including expressive and productive vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension measures through Year 2 of school. We then related these to the unique set of measures collected in the first phase of LuCiD to determine how early language and cognitive skills impacted word decoding and comprehension skills; these early skills included children’s cognitive precursors to language development, their early years language environment (e.g., input frequency, lexical diversity), and individualised trajectories of oral vocabulary, morphology, and pragmatic development.

This longitudinal behavioural work was aligned with computational modelling of literacy development to produce formalised explanatory models of the causal links between preschool language and cognitive ability and unfolding literacy skills.6,7.

Project Team: Katie Alcock, Kate Cain (Lead), Morten Christiansen, Lana Jago, Padraic Monaghan, Julian Pine, Meredith Rowe, Caroline Rowland and Anna Theakston

Duration: 2 years, starting January 2020

Project Number: 3.3

Key Outputs

Jago, L.S., Monaghan, P., Alcock, K.J., & Cain, K. (2025). The effect of preschool vocabulary and grammar on early reading comprehension and word reading: A systematic review and meta-analysis Educational Research Review, Vol 47, 100680

Monaghan, P., Jago, L.S., Speyer, L., Turnbull, H., Alcock, K.J., Rowland, C.F., & Cain, K. (2024). Statistical learning ability at 17 months relates to early reading skills via oral language Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Monaghan, P., Donnelly, S., Alcock, K., Bidgood, A., Cain, K., Durrant, S., Frost, R. L. A., Jago, L., Peter, M. S., Pine, J. M., Turnbull, H., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Learning to generalise but not segment an artificial language at 17 months predicts children’s language skills 3 years later. Cognitive Psychology

 

References

  1. Duff, F. J., Reen, G., Plunkett, K., & Nation, K. (2015). Do infant vocabulary skills predict school-age language and literacy outcomes? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 56(8), 848-856.
  2. Fricke, S., Bowyer-Crane, C., Haley, A. J., Hulme, C., & Snowling, M. J. (2013). Efficacy of language intervention in the early years. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54(3), 280–290.
  3. von Hippel, P., Workman, J., & Downey, D., (2017). Inequality in reading and math skills comes mainly from early childhood: A replication, and partial correction, of 'Are schools the great equalizer?'. SSRN, WP 3036094.
  4. Law, J., McBean, K., & Rush, R. (2011). Communication skills in a population of primary school‐aged children raised in an area of pronounced social disadvantage. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 46(6), 657-664.
  5. Social Mobility Commission (2017). Social mobility in Great Britain: Fifth state of the nation report. UK Government.
  6. Jones, G. & Rowland, C.(2017). Diversity not quantity in caregiver speech: using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the quantity and diversity of the input on vocabulary growth. Cognitive Psychology, 98, 1-21.
  7. Monaghan, P., Chang, Y.N., Welbourne, S., & Brysbaert, M. (2017). Exploring the relations between word frequency, language exposure and bilingualism in a computational model of reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 93, 1-21.

 

What We Do