Browsing by Author "Salonen, Katariina"

There is a little research of early pre-reading skills, such as rapid naming and letter knowledge. Also the associations between early lexicon and early pre-reading skills have been studied only a little. Earlier studies have shown that lexical development is associated with later language skills, such as development of morphology. Children with typical and small lexicon size at age 2;0 have also differed in other, later language skills. The associations between the composition of the lexicon and other language skills, and pre-reading skills as well, have been studied only a little. The aim of this study was to investigate the associations between the size and the composition of the lexicon at age 2;0 and pre-reading skills at age 3;6. The aim of this study was also to investigate whether children with typical and small lexicon size at age 2;0 differ in their early pre-reading skills. The sample included 50 Finnish-speaking children, which were part of sample in Sanaseula Study. In this study, Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventories, Toddler version was used to study the size and the composition of the lexicon at age 2;0. LUKIVA-method was used to study pre-reading skills at age 3;6. Associations between the size and the composition of the lexicon and pre-reading skills were studied by using Spearmann’s correlation coefficients. Mann-Whitney U-test was used to study whether children with typical and small vocabulary size differ in pre-reading skills. The size and the composition of the lexicon at age 2;0 were not associated with rapid naming and letter knowledge at age 3;6. Children with typical or small vocabulary size at age 2;0 did not differ in pre-reading skills at age 3;6. Thus, small size of the lexicon at age 2;0 does not seem to be a risk factor for very early pre-reading skills in this study. Pre-reading skills are only developing at age 3;6 so that age might be too early to show the associations between lexicon and pre-reading skills. In future studies it would be interesting to study associations between the size and the composition of the lexicon at age 2;0 and later pre-reading skills, such as pre reading skills at age 5;0 and at age 6;0.