The study, “Exploring Cognition, Language, and Emergent Literacy in Young Children with Asthma” investigated factors contributing to children’s home literacy environment and the effects it has on the child’s emergent literacy and language abilities. It also aimed to support previous literature that found children with asthma have poorer language abilities and lower academic performance than their healthier peers.
The research questions include: 1) How strong are the correlations between the home literacy environment, annual income, parent education, and children’s emergent literacy and language skills? 2) Do children with asthma differ from children without asthma on cognitive-linguistic measures or home literacy environments? A total of 24 participants (ages 4-6) completed standardized assessments that measure expressive and receptive language, phonological awareness, emergent literacy, and cognition. The parents of all children completed a home literacy environment survey and parents of children with asthma (n=5) also completed a survey assessing their child’s symptoms and treatment.
Some major findings concluded that parent education and household income may not strongly impact child success based on the weak correlations. Other home-literacy environment factors such as, parent-child word reading engagement which was found to be correlated with word reading fluency, supported previous research that home-literacy environment may predict child’s literacy skills. Another major finding is that children with asthma only differed from their healthy peers on one variable: total books read per week. The number of books read per week were much lower for children with asthma. These results need to be replicated with a larger sample size.
This work is extremely relevant to my future career as a Speech-Language Pathologist. Through this research, I gained experience in conducting standardized language assessments and working one-on-one with children. I was able to gain insights on different factors that may impact a child’s ability to communicate and their academic performance.
Author: Hannah Fuchs
Faculty Advisors: Margaret Cullen-Conway and Arnold Olszewksi, Speech Pathology & Audiology
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