the Children's Book Title List. On this there are 36 children's book titles and 20 foils. The test required that the parents indicate which title were the real books. There was a cacophony of tests that measured the children's cognitive abilities. These measured general intelligence, phonological and language understanding, letter knowledge, and literacy skill. First, "the frequency of being read to was correlated with children's vocabulary scores, age of first being read to, and age of being regularly read to... (Evans, Shaw, Bell)." However, it was not a predictor or rapid automatized naming speed and visual perception/nonverbal reasoning. Parental reports of the frequency of activities at home dealing with letters (letter names, sounds, printing letters, etc...) predicted future knowledge of letter names, sounds, and phonological sensitivity after controlling for the child age, level of parental education and child's cognitive abilities. The frequency of book reading at home influenced the child's development of vocabulary. Also, teaching the alphabetical knowledge influenced reading and writing. The researchers stress that there were very few disadvantaged families in this study and that most of the parents were likely to have been interested in reading to have participated in this study which required a substantial time investment.
             (b) Parental influences on Chinese literacy development: A comparison of preschoolers in Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore
             This study conducted by Li and Rao began with three predictions for their findings about Chinese literacy in the societies of Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore. First, they anticipated finding age differences in Chinese literacy, with the older children surpassing the younger ones. Second, they predicted societal differences in Chinese literacy development, with children in Hong Kong exceeding those from Beijing and Singapore on...