Home literacy environment of pre-school children with intellectual disabilities.
Preschoolers with ID have fewer child-started reading moments, so brief parent coaching on book access and shared reading can lift language skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team visited families of preschoolers with intellectual disability. They asked parents what books and games were in the home. They counted how often kids picked up books on their own. They also gave quick language and early-reading tests to the children.
The goal was to see if the home literacy setup matched the child’s skills.
What they found
Kids with ID started fewer reading activities themselves. Parents, not the kids, usually opened the book. Yet when parents owned books and read aloud often, the children had stronger vocabulary and print knowledge.
Simply having books on the shelf and sharing them predicted better language scores.
How this fits with other research
Channell et al. (2013) later showed the same ID group falls behind in word reading and phonics by school age. The new data explain part of why: the home input starts lower.
Grove et al. (2017) found shifting phonological weak spots in early elementary years. Cramm et al. (2009) adds that boosting parent book use early could soften those later gaps.
Zabidi et al. (2023) showed any shared parent activity builds closeness. Reading together is one easy, cheap way to hit both bonding and literacy goals.
Why it matters
You can coach parents in one visit. Tell them to keep a small basket of books near the sofa. Model ten minutes of shared reading: let the child turn pages, name pictures, and repeat words. No extra clinic time is needed, and the child gets both language input and parent attention.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: For pre-school children, the home literacy environment (HLE) plays an important role in the development of language and literacy skills. As there is little known about the HLE of children with intellectual disabilities (ID), the aim of the present study was to investigate the HLE of children with ID in comparison with children without disabilities. METHOD: Parent questionnaires concerning aspects of the HLE were used to investigate differences between 48 children with ID, 107 children without disabilities of the same chronological age and 36 children without disabilities of the same mental age (MA). Furthermore, for the children with ID, correlations were computed between aspects of the HLE and children's non-verbal intelligence, speech intelligibility, language and early literacy skills. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: From the results of the multivariate analyses of variance it could be concluded that the HLE of children with ID differed from that of children in the chronological age group on almost all aspects. When compared with children in the MA group, differences in the HLE remained. However, differences mainly concerned child-initiated activities and not parent-initiated activities. Correlation analyses showed that children's activities with literacy materials were positively related with MA, productive syntax and vocabulary age, and book orientation skills. Also, children's involvement during storybook reading was related with their MA, receptive language age, productive syntax and vocabulary age, book orientation and rapid naming of pictures. The amount of literacy materials parents provided was related to a higher productive syntax age and level of book orientation of the children. Parent play activities were also positively related to children's speech intelligibility. The cognitive disabilities of the children were the main cause of the differences found in the HLE between children with ID and children without disabilities. Parents also adapt their level to the developmental level of their child, which may not always be the most stimulating for the children.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2009.01222.x