Children's Early Decontextualized Talk Predicts Academic Language Proficiency in Midadolescence

Abstract

This study examines whether children’s decontextualized talk—talk about nonpresent events, explanations, orpretend—at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language(AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL profi ciency has been identified as an important predictor ofadolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualizedtalk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomesremains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of childtalk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of seventh-grade AL proficiency, even aftercontrolling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, andchild syntactic comprehension.