The Impact of the Digital Home Environment on Kindergartners’ Language and Early Literacy

We examined whether a digital home literacy environment could be distinguished from a (traditional) analog home literacy environment, and whether both were related to kindergartners’ language and literacy levels, taking parental expectations into account. Caregivers of 71 kindergarteners filled out a questionnaire on the home environment (expectations, activities, and materials), and the children were assessed on language (vocabulary and grammar) and literacy (begin phoneme awareness, segmentation skill, and grapheme knowledge) skills. Results showed that a digital environment could be distinguished from an analog environment. However, only the analog environment was related to children’s language abilities. Parental expectations were related directly to both language and literacy abilities. The fact that there was no relation between the digital home environment and language and literacy outcomes might indicate large variation in the quality of the digital home environment. More attention is needed to this part of daily life when growing up in a digital society.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Frontiers in Psychology

• Publication date

  2020-09-18

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science, Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.538584PMID 33071858PMCID 7533541
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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