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Reading and Writing
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10475-7
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Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,
home literacy environment, andChinese children’s word
reading acrosscontexts
Su‑ZhenZhang1,2· TomohiroInoue1 · GeorgeK.Georgiou3
Accepted: 5 August 2023
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023
Abstract
We examined the relations between mothers’ reading skills, home literacy environ-
ment (HLE), and children’s emergent literacy skills and word reading and whether
their relations vary across urban and rural contexts in China. Four hundred third-
year kindergarten Chinese children (Mage = 74.50 ± 3.77 months) were recruited
from Jining (N = 232) and the small towns of Luqiao and Mapo (N = 168). The chil-
dren were assessed on emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter knowledge, phonologi-
cal awareness, rapid automatized naming [RAN], and vocabulary) and word reading.
Their mothers were also assessed on reading skills and completed a questionnaire on
HLE (direct teaching, shared book reading, and access to literacy resources [ALR]).
Results of structural equation modeling showed that (a) mothers’ reading skills cor-
related with shared book reading and ALR in both groups, (b) direct teaching pre-
dicted children’s pinyin letter knowledge, and ALR predicted phonological aware-
ness and vocabulary in both groups after controlling for mothers’ reading skills and
parents’ education, and (c) mothers’ reading skills had an indirect effect on chil-
dren’s word reading through vocabulary (in the urban group) or phonological aware-
ness (in the rural group). Multigroup analyses further showed that the effect of direct
teaching on RAN was stronger in the rural group. These findings suggest that HLE
exerts its effect on children’s emergent literacy skills and word reading across con-
texts, even after controlling for mothers’ reading skills.
Keywords Chinese· Familial control method· Genetic confound· Home literacy
environment· Reading
* Tomohiro Inoue
tinoue@cuhk.edu.hk
1 Department ofPsychology, The Chinese University ofHong Kong, HongKong,
NewTerritories, China
2 Department ofForeign Languages, Jining University, Jining, China
3 Faculty ofEducation, University ofAlberta, Edmonton, Canada
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
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Introduction
Current theoretical models of the environmental influences on children’s develop-
ment, such as the intergenerational transfer of socioeconomic resources model
(Davis-Kean etal., 2021), posit that parents can influence their children’s devel-
opment both directly and indirectly through distributed pathways, including their
involvement in storybook reading and the provision of learning resources at home.
During the past few decades, there has been growing evidence that home liter-
acy environment (HLE) plays an important role in children’s language and liter-
acy development across different languages and cultures (e.g., Inoue et al., 2020;
Manolitsis etal., 2011; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Torppa etal., 2022; for reviews,
see Dong etal., 2020; Nag etal., 2019; Sénéchal etal., 2017). However, most of the
theoretical models and empirical studies did not account for the fact that parental
influences are transmitted not only through environmental factors (environmental
transmission) but also through genetic factors (genetic transmission, i.e., transmis-
sion of traits from parents to their children by genetic means; see Hart etal., 2021,
for a relevant discussion). In fact, to the best of our knowledge, very few studies
on HLE have considered the effects of parents’ reading skills on children’s reading
skills and, therefore, have failed to separate the “true” effect of HLE from potential
genetic confounds (for exceptions, see Dulay etal., 2019; van Bergen etal., 2017).
In addition, the few studies that considered the effects of parents’ reading skills in
examining the association between HLE and children’s reading development were
conducted with families from the same society with a relatively homogeneous socio-
economic status (SES). This is problematic because some recent studies have shown
that the role of HLE in reading may partly vary between families from urban and
rural contexts (Leng et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023). Thus, in the present study,
we aimed to examine the relations between mothers’ reading skills (used as a proxy
for genetic transmission), HLE, and children’s emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter
knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming [RAN], and vocab-
ulary) and word reading, and whether the relations vary between urban and rural
contexts in China. Examining these relations in China gives us a unique opportu-
nity because of the documented financial disparities between different places in the
country (Sicular etal., 2007) and because these children learn to read the same lan-
guage and are taught in the same curriculum.
HLE andchildren’s reading skills acrossdifferent socioeconomic contexts
Our examination of the relationship between HLE and children’s reading skills
drew on the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal, 2006; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002;
Sénéchal et al., 2017), according to which parent–child interactions during home
literacy activities can be grouped into two broad categories: code-related (or formal)
and meaning-related (or informal) activities. Code-related activities engage chil-
dren directly with print through activities such as teaching letters, words, and spell-
ing. Meaning-related activities, on the other hand, are those in which the meaning
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Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
conveyed by the print is the primary focus of the activity, such as shared book read-
ing between parents and children (Sénéchal, 2006; Sénéchal et al., 2017). Code-
related activities are associated with children’s reading skills through letter knowl-
edge (e.g., Georgiou etal., 2021; Silinskas etal., 2020, 2021), and meaning-related
activities are associated with children’s reading skills through oral language skills,
such as vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Hood et al., 2008; Sénéchal, 2006; Torppa
et al., 2022). In addition to the code-related and meaning-related HLE activities,
some researchers have proposed that access to literacy resources (ALR), often oper-
ationalized with the number of children’s books at home, is a separate component
of HLE that independently predicts children’s language and literacy over and above
the effects of code-related and meaning-related activities (e.g., Zhang etal., 2020,
2023; Wang & Liu, 2021). Nag etal. (2019) also considered “books at home” as a
separate construct in their Books-at-home/Home Tutoring/Adult Literacy Practices/
Home-School Connections framework used to synthesise multi-country evidence on
home literacy.
Previous studies in various languages, including Chinese, have provided evidence
for these predictions by showing that each aspect of HLE predicts later reading,
often indirectly through widely distributed pathways mediated by different emergent
literacy skills (e.g., Inoue etal., 2018; Liu etal., 2018; Silinskas etal., 2020, 2021;
Wang & Liu, 2021; for a review, see Sénéchal etal., 2017). For example, in a longi-
tudinal study with a sample of Finnish children followed from ages 2 to 15, Torppa
etal. (2022) found that parents’ direct teaching of literacy (a code-related activity)
predicted later reading through its effect on emergent literacy skills (a composite
score derived from letter knowledge and phonological awareness), while shared
reading (a meaning-related activity) predicted later reading through its effect on
vocabulary. Similarly, in a study with English-speaking Canadian children, Sénéchal
and LeFevre (2014) found that whereas the frequency of parent teaching predicted
growth in early literacy from kindergarten to Grade 1 and growth in word reading
during Grade 1, shared book reading during kindergarten year predicted growth in
receptive vocabulary from kindergarten to Grade 1. Moreover, in a cross-linguistic
study with children learning to read in four alphabetic orthographies (Dutch, Eng-
lish, German, and Greek), Inoue et al. (2020) found that ALR independently pre-
dicted different emergent literacy skills (letter knowledge, phonological awareness,
and vocabulary) and through their effects later reading and spelling in all languages,
after controlling for the effects of parent teaching and shared book reading. Finally,
in a study with Chinese kindergarten children, Liu etal. (2018) found similar results
showing that direct teaching of Chinese characters and pinyin letters (an alphabetic
coding system in Chinese) predicted word reading through its effect on phonological
awareness, while ALR predicted word reading through its effect on vocabulary.
However, it is important to note that most of the previous studies were conducted
in European countries or North America (see Sénéchal et al., 2017), where socie-
ties are, on average, relatively affluent (World Bank, 2023). Thus, it remains unclear
whether the results of these studies can be generalized to socioeconomically disad-
vantaged societies. Indeed, in a systematic review of studies in low- and middle-
income countries, Nag etal. (2019) showed that a range of contextual factors (e.g.,
home language, adult literacy practices, home-school connections) might influence
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
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the relationship between HLE and children’s literacy development. Several empiri-
cal studies have also found that the role of HLE in disadvantaged contexts may be
partly different from that in affluent contexts (e.g., Dulay etal., 2019; Dynia etal.,
2020; Friedlander, 2020; Mendive etal., 2017, 2020; Strasser & Lissi, 2009; Wolf
& McCoy, 2019). For example, in a sample of kindergarten children from Chile,
Strasser and Lissi (2009) reported no effects of code-related and meaning-related
HLE on children’s letter knowledge, phonological awareness, or vocabulary. Like-
wise, in a sample of kindergarten children from Ghana, Wolf and McCoy (2019)
found a negative effect of a home environment factor on children’s emergent lit-
eracy skills (a factor derived from various cognitive-linguistic skills, including let-
ter knowledge, phonological awareness, and vocabulary). However, the contextual
diversity across societies in developing countries (e.g., school curricula, parental
values, societal expectations for academic achievement; see Nag etal., 2019) makes
it difficult to draw any firm conclusions from the results of these studies.
To date, two studies have directly compared the role of different aspects of HLE
between families from rural and urban contexts in the same country (China: Leng
et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023) with mixed results. Leng et al. (2023) examined
the relationships between family SES, HLE (a latent factor derived from both code-
related and meaning-related activities), ALR, parental beliefs, and children’s vocab-
ulary knowledge in urban and rural contexts in China. They found that the associa-
tions of family SES and ALR with children’s vocabulary knowledge were stronger
in the rural group than in the urban group. Zhang et al. (2023) also examined the
relations between various parental factors (educational level, expectations for chil-
dren’s literacy, and attitudes toward home teaching of literacy), HLE, extracurricular
activities, and children’s emergent literacy and word reading skills in families from
urban and rural contexts. Their results showed that the relations between the differ-
ent aspects of HLE and children’s early literacy skills were similar in the two groups,
except that the significant association between meaning-related HLE and phonologi-
cal awareness was found only for the rural group. Taken together, the results of these
studies suggest that the associations between HLE and children’s literacy develop-
ment may partly differ across contexts. Unfortunately, neither of these two studies
accounted for the potential influences of parents’ reading skills, leaving the “true”
effects of HLE on children’s language and literacy untested.
The genetic confound intheHLE‑reading relationship
Some researchers have argued that the relationship between HLE and children’s
reading skills may be, at least partly, due to a genetic confound (e.g., Hart et al.,
2021; van Bergen et al., 2017). In fact, the existing literature, particularly from
behavioral genetics studies, has provided evidence that parents transmit their genes
to their children, including genes related to reading ability (e.g.,Byrne etal., 2009;
Olson etal., 2017; Swagerman etal., 2017; Wadsworth et al., 2002). Studies that
have examined the behavioral traits of parents and their children have also reported
moderate correlations between them. For example, van Bergen etal. (2015) showed
that mothers’ reading scores correlated by .32 with their child’s reading scores.
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Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
Moreover, studies of children with a family history of dyslexia have further shown
that these children are more likely to experience reading difficulties in the future
than children whose parents do not have a history of any reading difficulties (e.g.,
Snowling etal., 2007; Torppa etal., 2007).
To address this theoretical and methodological issue, Hart etal. (2021) proposed
the Familial Control Method, which, in the absence of genetic data, allows research-
ers to test for more “genuine” environmental effects on children’s reading skills
while accounting for the genetic confound. More specifically, for behavioral traits
such as reading that is largely transmitted from parents to children through genes
rather than environment (e.g.,Byrne etal., 2009; Wadsworth etal., 2002), research-
ers can measure the same behavioral trait (i.e., phenotype) in both the parents and
the child, and then use the parental traits as covariates in the analysis to examine the
unique effects of an environmental measure (e.g., HLE) on children’s developmental
outcomes (e.g., reading skills). If the environmental measure holds its effect on chil-
dren’s outcomes after controlling for the effects of parents’ traits, then this measure
can be considered to exert a “true” environmental effect on children’s outcomes that
is partially independent of the genetic effect.
To our knowledge, only two studies have employed the Familial Control Method
to test the unique role of HLE in children’s literacy development (Dulay et al.,
2019; van Bergen etal., 2017),1 and their results were inconsistent. In a study with
a sample of Dutch children (ages 6–16) and their parents, van Bergen etal. (2017)
found that when the effects of parents’ reading were statistically controlled, only the
number of books at home, but not parents’ education and reading frequency, pre-
dicted children’s reading skills, suggesting that literacy materials in the home (i.e.,
ALR) may exert a unique environmental effect on children’s reading skills. Dulay
etal. (2019) also examined the relationships between parents’ literacy skills, HLE
(latent factor covering both code- and meaning-related activities), literacy resources
at home (latent factor covering the number of adults’/children’s books, letter/word
exercise books, educational games, and other educational materials), and children’s
(ages 5–8) oral language and print knowledge among families in the Philippines. In
contrast to the findings of van Bergen etal. (2017), they found that whereas HLE
activities predicted children’s oral language and print knowledge, literacy resources
at home did not predict children’s language and literacy skills after controlling for
parents’ reading skills. Therefore, it remains unclear which aspect of HLE holds a
“true” environmental effect on children’s reading skills when parents’ reading skills
are statistically controlled. In addition, since these studies were conducted with fam-
ilies from the same society with a relatively homogeneous context, we still do not
know whether the relationships between parents’ reading, HLE, and children’s read-
ing skills are similar across urban and rural contexts.
1 It should be noted that there are two other studies that controlled for parental skills in the analysis.
Puglisi etal.’s (2017) study included data on parental skills, but parents were assessed on language and
phonological skills, not on reading skills. Torppa et al.’s (2022) study controlled for parental reading
skills using a dichotomous variable for familial risk of dyslexia, but their models did not include parental
reading skills as a covariate.
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
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The present study
The purpose of this study was to test an intergenerational transmission model of
reading (Fig.1) that encompassed mothers’ reading skills (a proxy for genetic trans-
mission), HLE (direct teaching, shared book reading, and ALR), and children’s
emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter knowledge, phonological awareness, RAN,
and vocabulary) and word reading in groups of mothers and children from urban
and rural contexts in China. The two study sites were selected to represent relatively
socioeconomically affluent and disadvantaged contexts, respectively, based on the
data from a recent population census (National Bureau of Statistics in China, 2021).2
Specifically, we aimed to answer the following three research questions (RQs):
RQ1: Do different aspects of HLE predict children’s emergent literacy skills and
word reading even when the effects of mothers’ reading skills are controlled? To
our knowledge, no studies in Chinese have examined the unique effect of HLE on
children’s skills after controlling for parents’ skills. We did not formulate a specific
hypothesis for this due to inconsistencies in the results of the existing studies (Dulay
etal., 2019; van Bergen etal., 2017).
Fig. 1 Hypothesized Model for the Relationship between Mothers’ Reading Skills, Home Literacy
Environment, and Children’s Reading Skills. Note. WR = word reading; SV = sentence verification;
RAN = rapid automatized naming; CR = character recognition
2 This does not mean that families within each site were all affluent or disadvantaged. We expected
within-context variability, but that, on average, the SES would be relatively lower in the rural site and
relatively higher in the urban site.
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Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
RQ2: Do mothers’ reading skills have a direct effect on children’s word reading
after controlling for HLE and parents’ education, or is their effect mediated by emer-
gent literacy skills? Based on the existing findings (van Bergen etal., 2015, 2017),
we hypothesized that mothers’ reading skills would exert a direct effect on children’s
word reading even when the effects of HLE, parents’ education, and children’s emer-
gent literacy skills are controlled.
RQ3: Are parental influences on children’s skills similar across the urban and
rural contexts? Based on the findings of studies in Western countries with relatively
affluent societies (e.g., Georgiou etal., 2021; Torppa etal., 2022) as well as studies
from developing countries with disadvantaged societies (e.g., Gao etal., 2021; Wolf
& McCoy, 2019), we hypothesized that the effect of HLE on children’s word read-
ing would be stronger in the urban group than in the rural group. This was because
parents in the urban context are, on average, likely to be more highly educated and
knowledgeable about the home teaching of literacy (Davis-Kean et al., 2021). In
contrast, mothers’ reading skills would have a relatively stronger association with
children’s skills in the rural group than in the urban group because families from the
rural context tend to have limited learning resources at home (Leng etal., 2023), and
as a result, the influence of mothers’ reading skills would be more pronounced com-
pared to those from the urban context.
Method
Participants
The participants were 400 third-year kindergarten Chinese children recruited from
public kindergartens in Shandong province, China: 232 children (102 girls and 130
boys; Mage = 74.16 months, SD = 3.56) were recruited from three public kinder-
gartens in Jining and 168 children (72 girls and 96 boys; Mage = 74.96, SD = 4.02)
from six public kindergartens in Luqiao and Mapo towns. Importantly, the two sites
were selected within the same province (Shandong) to control for other potential
confounds, such as home/school languages and school curriculum (all participating
families used Mandarin as their home language, and all participating kindergartens
used Mandarin as their school language with the same curriculum).
All children were native Mandarin speakers, and none were diagnosed with
any intellectual, behavioral, or sensory deficits (based on teachers’ reports).
According to the Early Learning and Development Guideline for children aged 3
to 6 (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2012), children at
this age should show an active interest in reading books, enjoy telling stories they
have heard or read with others, have adequate listening comprehension skills,
and recognize some simple characters. For all children, their primary caregiv-
ers were their mothers, who lived with their children and were available to be
tested on their reading skills at their children’s kindergarten. Parental and school
consent and children’s assent were obtained prior to testing. Ethics approval was
also obtained from the ethics committee at Jining University, and the study was
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
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conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the American Psychologi-
cal Association (American Psychological Association, 2017).
The mothers of the children also participated in the study by completing a
questionnaire on the home literacy environment. Additionally, mothers’ reading
skills were tested using two measures (see below). Based on parents’ reports,
both mothers’ and fathers’ median and mode highest achieved education level
in Jining was “university”, which is similar to that reported in previous studies
with parents from urban China, such as Beijing (Su etal., 2017) and Shanghai
(Deng etal., 2015). In the rural site, both mothers’ and fathers’ median and mode
highest achieved education level was “junior high school”, which is also simi-
lar to that reported in previous studies with parents from rural China (e.g., Gao
et al., 2021; Leng et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2018). This suggests that our par-
ticipants in the urban group were coming primarily from upper-middle SES fami-
lies, and those in the rural group were coming mostly from low-SES households
(see Table1). In addition, the two groups were representative of parents living in
urban cities and rural areas of China, respectively (National Bureau of Statistics
in China, 2021).
Measures
Mothers’ reading measures
Word reading To assess mothers’ reading skills, we administered two tasks: word
reading and sentence verification. The word reading task was adopted from Liu
(2014) and required mothers to read as accurately as possible a list of 100 Chi-
nese words. The words used in the task included both frequent and infrequent
words, covering a wide range of difficulty, in order to capture individual differ-
ences in mothers’ reading skills. The words were ordered in increasing difficulty
based on both the frequency and naming error rates reported in Liu etal.’s (2007)
study with university students. The task was discontinued after six consecutive
errors, and a participant’s score was total number correct (max = 100). Cron-
bach’s alpha in our sample was .90.
Sentence verification In the sentence verification task, mothers were given
3min to read as many sentences as possible and indicate by circling Y (for Yes)
or N (for No) whether the factual meaning of each sentence was correct or not.
The test was constructed following the principles of the Test of Silent Reading
Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC; Wagner et al., 2010), which has been
found to correlate strongly with other measures of reading comprehension (e.g.,
Ahmed etal., 2014; Kim etal., 2011) and to load on a comprehension factor (e.g.,
Lonigan & Burgess, 2017). There were 100 sentences of increasing length. A par-
ticipant’s score was calculated by subtracting the number of incorrect responses
from the number of correct ones. Test–retest reliability with a sub-sample of par-
ents (n = 20) was .88.
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Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
Table 1 Descriptive Statistics for the Variables for Each Sample
RAN = rapid automatized naming
a Welch’s t values. Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons was applied. b Hedges’ g values
** p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001
Urban group Rural group
n M SD Skew Kurt n M SD Skew Kurt tagb
Mothers’ variables
Word reading 229 59.21 12.15 –0.23 0.29 165 43.31 15.54 –0.88 0.73 11.39*** 1.16
Sentence verification 232 69.09 12.59 –1.00 0.89 168 49.48 19.83 –0.65 –0.11 12.07*** 1.22
Home literacy environment
Teach to read characters 220 3.99 0.89 –0.95 1.09 166 3.82 1.09 –0.70 –0.32 1.69 0.17
Teach to write characters 220 3.34 1.28 –0.49 –0.90 166 3.57 1.33 –0.60 –0.80 –1.72 0.18
Teach to read pinyin 220 3.05 1.41 –0.18 –1.30 166 4.02 1.10 –1.24 1.09 –7.34*** 0.75
Teach radicals 220 2.12 1.28 0.67 –0.98 166 2.51 1.41 0.36 –1.22 –2.84** 0.29
Read to child (bedtime) 220 3.89 1.05 –0.78 –0.23 166 2.76 1.31 0.26 –1.15 9.40*** 0.96
Read to child (other time) 220 3.32 1.10 –0.36 –0.86 166 2.73 1.25 0.28 –1.03 4.92*** 0.50
Discuss about the stories 220 3.53 1.11 –0.64 –0.51 166 2.56 1.33 0.36 –1.19 7.80*** 0.80
N of children’s books 216 4.86 1.83 –0.17 –1.52 164 2.49 1.23 1.80 3.30 14.31*** 1.48
Parents’ educationa232 10.83 1.95 –1.11 3.14 168 6.42 1.94 0.72 2.46 22.37*** 2.26
Children’s variables
Pinyin letter knowledge 231 5.01 5.91 0.83 –0.78 168 12.29 6.02 –0.70 –0.96 –12.05*** 1.22
Pinyin invented spelling 230 7.98 10.40 2.39 6.25 168 20.83 22.98 0.74 –1.20 –7.50*** 0.76
Syllable deletion 231 10.94 4.28 –0.11 –0.64 168 7.08 4.75 0.24 –0.71 8.49*** 0.86
RAN 231 27.74 8.29 2.10 10.60 166 29.24 10.48 1.94 5.20 –1.61 0.16
Vocabulary 230 15.90 2.65 –0.58 0.36 168 13.26 3.10 –0.61 0.66 9.13*** 0.93
Character recognition 231 11.00 15.05 1.55 1.26 168 6.65 11.14 2.28 4.70 3.17** 0.32
Word reading 231 15.15 12.80 0.25 –1.61 168 11.97 12.40 0.54 –1.38 2.48*0.25
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
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Home literacy environment questionnaire
Direct teaching We asked mothers to think of a typical week in the past academic
year and indicate on a 5-point Likert scale the frequency of teaching their chil-
dren (a) to read Chinese characters, (b) to read pinyin, (c) to write Chinese char-
acters, and (d) to recognize radicals (orthographic units of Chinese characters).
The Likert scale ranged from never (1) to every day (5). A composite score for
direct teaching was calculated by averaging the z-scores of the four items. Cron-
bach’s alpha reliability in our sample was .75.
Shared book reading We asked mothers to think of a typical week in the past
year and indicate on a 5-point Likert scale (a) the frequency of reading a story to
their child at bedtime, (b) the frequency of reading a story to their child at other
times, and (c) the frequency of discussing different stories with their child. The
Likert scale ranged from never (1) to every day (5). A composite score for shared
book reading was calculated by averaging the z-scores of the three items. Cron-
bach’s alpha reliability in our sample was .87.
Access to literacy resources (ALR) To assess the amount of ALR, we asked
parents to report how many children’s books they had at home and then coded
the reported number on a 7-point scale (1 = none, 2 = 1–20, 3 = 21–40, 4 = 41–60,
5 = 61–80, 6 = 81–100, and 7 = more than 100 books; see Zhang etal., 2020).
To check the measurement invariance of our HLE questionnaire between the
groups, we tested a confirmatory factor analysis model with three factors (direct
teaching, shared book reading, and ALR). The factor loadings for each item
were constrained to be equal across the groups. The model showed a good fit
(χ2 = 70.77, df = 42, p = .004, comparative fit index [CFI] = .97, Tucker-Lewis
Index [TLI] = .96, root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = .06,
90% confidence interval [CI] [.03, .08], standardized root mean square residuals
[SRMR] = .06). In addition, the model fit was not significantly different from that
of a model without the factor loading constraints (∆χ2 = 9.34, df = 5, p = .096),
suggesting the measurement invariance of the HLE components across the
groups.
Parents’ education Parents’ education was used as a proxy for family SES
because it has been found to be the most powerful predictor of children’s cogni-
tive and academic outcomes among family SES indicators (e.g., Tighe & Davis-
Kean, 2021, Waters, 2021; see also Davis-Kean etal., 2021). We asked parents to
report on their highest achieved education using a 7-point scale: 1 = third grade
or less, 2 = fourth to sixth grade, 3 = junior high school completion, 4 = senior
high school completion, 5 = technical secondary school or college, 6 = university,
and 7 = completed graduate studies (master’s or PhD). A composite score for par-
ents’ education was calculated by adding the scores for mothers’ and fathers’ edu-
cation. The correlation between them in our sample was .86.
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Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
Children’s emergent literacy andreading measures
Pinyin knowledge Two measures of pinyin knowledge were administered: pinyin
letter knowledge and pinyin invented spelling. In pinyin letter knowledge, chil-
dren were asked to read aloud 18 pinyin letters (e.g., a, h, k, m) printed on a sheet
of paper. A participant’s score was the total number correct (max = 18). Cron-
bach’s alpha in our sample was .94. In pinyin invented spelling, children were
asked to write down on a piece of paper five orally-presented words (xiā, zì, lóng,
chē, and dòu) in pinyin. All the letters of the pinyin alphabet (without lexical
tones) were printed on the top of the answer sheet for children’s reference. Each
item was scored from 0 to 12, following the guidelines provided by Lin et al.
(2010). The maximum possible score for this task was 60, and the interrater reli-
ability was .99. Pinyin letter knowledge and invented pinyin spelling were highly
correlated in our sample (r = .66). Thus, we created a composite score for pinyin
knowledge by averaging the z-scores of each task.
Phonological awareness The syllable deletion task from Li et al. (2012) was
used. The task has been used in several previous studies in Chinese and has been
found to have good reliability and validity (e.g., Shu etal., 2008; Zhang etal., 2013).
Children were asked to say what was left in a two- or three-syllable word after delet-
ing one of the syllables (e.g., Say /di 4 qiu 2/ ‘earth’. Now say /di 4 qiu2/ without /
qiu 2/ would be /di 4/ ‘land’; numbers indicate lexical tones). The task was discon-
tinued after five consecutive errors, and a participant’s score was the total number
correct (max = 20). Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .92.
Rapid automatized naming (RAN) Digit Naming from the Comprehensive Test
of Phonological Processing (Wagner etal., 2013) was used. Children were asked to
name as fast as possible six recurring Arabic numerals (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8; pronounced /
er 4/, /san 1/, /si 4/, /wu 3/, /qi 1/, and /ba 1/) that were repeated six times each and
arranged in semi-random order in four rows of nine. Prior to testing, the participants
were asked to name the digits in a practice trial to ensure familiarity. A participant’s
score was the total time to name all stimuli. The score was multiplied by -1 before
the analysis to ease the interpretation of the results (a higher score means better per-
formance). Wagner etal. (2013) reported test–retest reliability for kindergarten chil-
dren to be .80.
Vocabulary The Word Definitions task adapted in Chinese from the Stanford-
Binet Intelligence Scale (Thorndike etal., 1986) was used. The task has been used
in several previous studies in Chinese and has been found to have good reliability
and validity (e.g., Song etal., 2015; Zhang etal., 2020). The tester provided a word
orally to the child and then asked the child to define it using his/her own words.
A complete definition had to include the proper semantic category of the provided
word and one or more features of the word for a maximum of two points per item
(e.g., for the target word “rubbish”, a 2-point answer would be ‘unwanted or waste
materials such as useless cans or bottles’ and a 1-point answer would be ‘banana
peels thrown away’). The task consisted of two practice items and 32 test items.
Testing was discontinued after five consecutive errors, and a participant’s score was
the sum of scores aggregated across all responded items (max = 64). Cronbach’s
alpha in our sample was .90.
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
1 3
Word reading To assess children’s word reading, we administered the single-char-
acter recognition task from Li etal. (2012) and the two-character word reading task
from Ho and Bryant (1997). Children were first asked to read aloud 60 single-char-
acter words arranged in terms of increasing difficulty. The task was discontinued
after six consecutive errors, and a participant’s score was the total number correct.
Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .94. Next, children were asked to read aloud 34
two-character words presented in terms of increasing difficulty. The task was dis-
continued after six consecutive errors, and a participant’s score was the total number
correct. Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .90.
Procedure
All children were individually tested by trained testers from May to June (9 to
10months after the beginning of the school year) in a quiet room at their kindergar-
ten. Testing was completed in one session lasting approximately 30min. All proto-
cols were cross-checked for accuracy by two independent raters, and the inter-rater
reliability was .99. Mothers responded to the questionnaire during the same time as
their children’s testing. They were also tested on reading skills by the first author in
a quiet room at their children’s kindergarten; testing lasted approximately 20min. In
order to calculate the test–retest reliability for the timed measure (the sentence veri-
fication task), we randomly selected a subsample of mothers (n = 20) and reassessed
them on the same measure three weeks after the initial testing.
Statistical analysis
To examine the relations between mothers’ reading skills, HLE, and children’s
emergent literacy skills and word reading, we performed structural equation mod-
eling using Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2017). First, to test whether mothers’
reading skills had a direct association with children’s reading skills, we estimated
the hypothesized model (Fig.1). The factor loadings of each indicator for both latent
variables were set to be equal across the urban and rural groups to ensure the meas-
urement invariance of the latent constructs for reading skills (Chen, 2007; Steen-
kamp & Baumgartner, 1998). We also estimated the same model without the factor
loading constraints and compared the model fits to test the effect of the factor load-
ing constraints on the overall model fit. All variables were standardized within each
sample before the analysis. Model fits were assessed using four fit indices: CFI, TLI,
RMSEA, and SRMR (see Kline, 2015). Missing data were handled by the full infor-
mation maximum likelihood estimation implemented in Mplus (Graham, 2009).
Second, we estimated the associations between HLE and children’s emergent liter-
acy skills and word reading after controlling for the effects of mothers’ reading skills
and parents’ education. In addition, to test whether the relations between the variables
differed between the two groups, we performed multigroup analyses. Specifically, we
compared the chi-square value of a constrained model in which the path coefficient
was constrained to be equal across the two groups with that of an unconstrained model.
Finally, we estimated the indirect effects of mothers’ reading skills and each HLE
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1 3
Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
component on children’s reading skills through emergent literacy skills using mediation
analysis with a bootstrapping technique (5000 resamples; Hayes & Scharkow, 2013;
Shrout & Bolger, 2002).
This study was not preregistered, and the data are not publicly available due to pri-
vacy restrictions. However, the analysis codes and results for structural equation mod-
eling are available online at https:// osf. io/ zuk9x/, and the data that support the findings
of the study are available upon request from the corresponding author.
Results
Descriptive statistics andcorrelations
Table1 presents the descriptive statistics for the measures used in the study. An exami-
nation of the distributional properties of the measures showed that pinyin invented
spelling, RAN, and character recognition were positively skewed in both groups. A log
transformation was used to normalize their distributions (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2012),
and the transformed scores were used in further analyses. Welch’s t-tests showed that
mothers’ reading skills were greater in the urban group than in the rural group (Hedges’
gs = 1.16–1.22). Shared book reading (gs = 0.50–0.96) and ALR (g = 1.48) were also
greater in the urban group than in the rural group. In contrast, direct teaching of pinyin
(g = 0.75) and radicals (g = 0.29) were greater in the rural group than in the urban group.
These are similar to the results for children, which showed that whereas phonological
awareness (g = 0.86), vocabulary (g = 0.93), and word reading (gs = 0.25–0.32) were all
greater in the urban group, pinyin letter knowledge (g = 1.22) and pinyin invented spell-
ing (g = 0.76) were greater in the rural group.
Table 2 presents the correlations between all variables separately for each group.
Mothers’ reading skills (word reading and sentence verification) were weakly corre-
lated with the three HLE aspects (rs = -.02 to .31 for the urban group and .02 to .34 for
the rural group) and children’s emergent literacy skills and word reading (rs = .04 to
.25 for the urban group and .08 to .31 for the rural group). Notably, the correlations of
mothers’ reading skills with HLE and children’s skills were largely comparable across
the two groups. In turn, direct teaching correlated moderately with children’s pinyin
knowledge (rs = .46 for the urban group and .48 for the rural group), while shared book
reading correlated weakly with children’s emergent literacy skills (except for pinyin
knowledge) and word reading only in the rural group (rs = .20 to .28). Finally, ALR
correlated weakly with children’s skills in both groups (rs = .12 to .31 for the urban
group and .10 to .34 for the rural group).
Structural equation modeling
Next, we estimated the hypothesized model shown in Fig.1. The model showed a good
fit, χ2(56) = 74.79, p = .048, CFI = .990, TLI = .979, RMSEA = .041, 90% CI [.005,
.064], SRMR = .031. In addition, the model fit was not significantly different from that
of the same model without the factor loading constraints (∆χ2 = 3.33, df = 4, p = .504),
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
1 3
Table 2 Correlations Between the Variables for Each Group
Correlations below the diagonal are for the urban group, and those above are for the rural group. WR = word reading; SV = sentence verification; PA = phonological aware-
ness; RAN = rapid automatized naming
*p < .05; **p < .01
123456789101112
1 Mothers’ WR .80** .02 .21* .34** .48** .08 .24** .22* .31** .25** .25**
2 Mothers’ SV .61** .03 .28** .27** .45** .08 .30** .20 .25** .23** .18*
3 Direct teaching .02 -.02 .27** .18* .05 .48** .14 .27** .03 .11 .16*
4 Shared reading .19** .17* .10 .41** .30** -.02 .25** .20* .23** .28** .25**
5 Access to resources .31** .30** .05 .36** .56** .10 .34** .22* .30** .34** .32**
6 Parents’ education .56** .46** .04 .17* .38** .00 .22** .21* .23** .20* .16*
7 Pinyin knowledge .09 .04 .46** .13 .12 .07 .38** .49** .27** .37** .43**
8PA .15* .14* .00 .08 .24** .21** .11 .50** .45** .63** .63**
9 RAN .15* .12 .02 .09 .28** .13 .27** .42** .35** .46** .48**
10 Vocabulary .25** .22** .05 .14* .26** .26** .09 .37** .14* .40** .39**
11 Character recognition .22** .13 .15* .13 .31** .24** .26** .48** .61** .30** .94**
12 Word reading .22** .12 .17* .12 .31** .22** .28** .44** .59** .30** .93**
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1 3
Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
suggesting the measurement invariance of the latent constructs for mothers’ and chil-
dren’s reading skills across the groups. The results showed that the direct effect of
mothers’ reading skills on children’s reading skills was not significant in either group
after controlling for the effects of HLE, parents’ education, and children’s emergent lit-
eracy skills (βs = -.01 for the urban group and .05 for the rural group).
Direct teaching was significantly associated with pinyin knowledge in both groups
(βs = .45 for the urban group and .50 for the rural group). Direct teaching was also asso-
ciated with RAN in the rural group (β = .27). In contrast, shared book reading was not
uniquely associated with any of children’s variables after controlling for the other vari-
ables. ALR was associated with phonological awareness (βs = .19 for the urban group
and .23 for the rural group) and vocabulary (βs = .17 for the urban group and .19 for the
rural group) in both groups, and it was also associated with RAN in the urban group
(β = .22). Finally, whereas mothers’ reading skills were only associated with vocabulary
in the urban group (β = .23), it was associated with phonological awareness, RAN, and
vocabulary in the rural group (βs = .21, .18, and .25, respectively).
The results of multigroup analyses showed that direct teaching was more strongly
associated with RAN in the rural group than in the urban group (∆χ2 = 7.85, df = 1,
p = .005). In addition, phonological awareness was more strongly associated with chil-
dren’s reading skills in the rural group (∆χ2 = 9.00, df = 1, p = .003), while RAN was
more strongly associated with children’s reading skills in the urban group (∆χ2 = 13.67,
df = 1, p < .001). None of the other associations between mothers’ reading skills, HLE,
and children’s skills were significantly different between the groups.
Finally, Table3 presents the indirect effects of mothers’ reading skills and HLE
on children’s reading skills through emergent literacy skills. The results showed that
direct teaching had a significant indirect effect on children’s reading skills through
pinyin knowledge in both groups (estimates = .045 for the urban group and .068 for
the rural group). RAN also mediated the effect of direct teaching on children’s read-
ing skills in the rural group (estimate = .036). ALR had an indirect effect on chil-
dren’s reading skills through phonological awareness, RAN, and vocabulary in the
urban group (estimates = .037, .105, and .023, respectively) and through phonologi-
cal awareness in the rural group (estimate = .109). Moreover, mothers’ reading skills
had an indirect effect on children’s reading skills through vocabulary in the urban
group (estimate = .031) and through phonological awareness in the rural group (esti-
mate = .099). Overall, these results suggest that HLE, particularly direct teaching
and ALR, may be associated with children’s emergent literacy skills and, through
them, their word reading in both groups, even when the effect of mothers’ reading
skills is statistically controlled.
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between mothers’ read-
ing skills, HLE, and children’s emergent literacy skills and word reading across
urban and rural contexts in China. Specifically, to examine whether HLE pre-
dicts children’s skills even when the effect of mothers’ reading skills (a proxy
for genetic transmission) was statistically controlled and whether the effects of
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
1 3
mothers’ reading skills and HLE on children’s skills were similar across contexts,
we estimated an intergenerational transmission model for the sample of mothers
and their children from urban (representing relatively affluent) and rural (repre-
senting relatively disadvantaged) contexts. The results revealed widely distrib-
uted, unique associations between various parental factors and children’s reading
development.
Before we discuss the results related to our research questions, it is important
to note two other interesting results. First, our results showed some notable dif-
ferences in HLE and children’s outcomes between the groups. Specifically, shared
book reading and access to literacy resources were greater in the urban group
than in the rural group. This is not surprising given the different socioeconomic
contexts in the groups: Parents in urban contexts are, on average, more educated
and engage in shared book reading with their children and provide them with lit-
eracy resources (e.g., Leng etal., 2023; see also Table1). However, direct teach-
ing of pinyin and radicals was greater in the rural group than in the urban group.
A possible explanation for this result may be the potential relation between par-
ents’ education and their parenting practices: Parents in rural China, especially
those who are less educated, may endorse more authoritarian practices and rely
Table 3 Indirect Effects of Mothers’ Reading Skills and Home Literacy Environment on Children’s
Reading Skills Through Emergent Literacy Skills
Note. Standardized estimates are shown. Bold font indicates significant indirect effects. BC = bias-
corrected; DT = direct teaching; SBR = shared book reading; ALR = access to literacy resources;
MR = mothers’ reading skills; PK = pinyin knowledge; PA = phonological awareness; RAN = rapid
automatized naming; Voc = vocabulary; CR = children’s reading skills
Urban group Rural group
Estimate BC Bootstrapped
95% CI
Estimate BC Bootstrapped
95% CI
DT → PK → CR .045 [.002, .102] .068 [.001, .148]
DT → PA → CR -.004 [-.034, .024] .037 [-.033, .115]
DT → RAN → CR .000 [-.065, .066] .036 [.001, .092]
Total indirect effect of DT .041 – .141 –
SBR → PA → CR -.001 [-.031, .029] .060 [-.004, .136]
SBR → Voc → CR .003 [-.016, .029] .012 [-.002, .047]
Total indirect effect of SBR .002 – .072 –
ALR → PA → CR .037 [.007, .084] .109 [.024, .213]
ALR → RAN → CR .105 [.037, .182] .009 [-.014, .058]
ALR → Voc → CR .023 [.002, .066] .016 [-.004, .064]
Total indirect effect of ALR .165 – .134 –
MR → PK → CR .007 [-.008, .041] .017 [-.003, .067]
MR → PA → CR .003 [-.041, .049] .099 [.014, .219]
MR → RAN → CR .025 [-.086, .148] .023 [-.002, .09]
MR → Voc → CR .031 [.003, .085] .022 [-.004, .079]
Total indirect effect of MR .066 – .161 –
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1 3
Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
on traditional, direct teaching at home (e.g., Xu etal., 2005). This also aligns
well with children’s outcomes, which show that while phonological awareness,
vocabulary, and word reading were all greater for children in the urban group,
pinyin letter knowledge and pinyin invented spelling were greater for children in
the rural group. The latter finding is theoretically important because it clearly
shows that direct teaching is crucial for the early acquisition of letter knowledge
(for a similar finding, see Inoue etal., 2022).
Second, in line with Hart et al.’s (2021) assumptions, mothers’ reading skills
were correlated not only with children’s outcomes but also with shared book reading
and access to literacy resources (but not as much as direct teaching) in both groups.
Some previous studies have also reported that children with familial risk for dyslexia
tend to engage in less frequent HLE activities with their parents and have access to
fewer literacy resources at home (e.g., Esmaeeli etal., 2018; Hamilton etal., 2016;
Ho etal., 2011). Our results add to this line of evidence and suggest that the rela-
tionship between HLE and children’s reading skills reported in previous studies
that did not consider parents’ reading skills may be partly biased due to a genetic
confound. A theoretical and methodological implication of our results is that, as
argued by some researchers (e.g., Dulay etal., 2019; Hart etal., 2021; van Bergen
etal., 2017), in order to examine the “true” environmental effects of HLE on chil-
dren’s reading skills that are less confounded by a genetic effect, researchers need to
employ a more genetically-sensitive approach, such as the Familial Control Method
(Hart etal., 2021).
In regard to our first research question, the results indicated that parents’ direct
teaching was associated with children’s pinyin knowledge, and access to literacy
resources was associated with phonological awareness and vocabulary in both urban
and rural groups after controlling for mothers’ reading skills, indicating their “true”
environmental effects on children’s emergent literacy skills. An important educa-
tional implication of these findings is that these aspects of HLE may be a promising
target for interventions that we can potentially support to improve children’s read-
ing skills (see e.g., Niklas & Schneider, 2017; Skibbe & Foster, 2019). In contrast,
shared book reading was not associated with any of the children’s outcomes after
controlling for mothers’ reading skills and the other aspects of HLE. There are at
least three explanations for this result. First, the associations between shared book
reading and children’s skills reported in previous studies (e.g., Sénéchal & LeFevre,
2014; Torppa etal., 2022) may have been largely due to a genetic confound from
parents’ reading skills to children’s reading skills, and the effect of shared book read-
ing may not hold when mothers’ reading skills are statistically controlled. In fact,
when we performed an exploratory analysis using the same model without the latent
factor variable for mothers’ reading skills, shared book reading was significantly
associated with vocabulary (β = .16, p = .040) in the rural group. We note, however,
that the effect of shared book reading on children’s outcomes remained non-signif-
icant in the urban group even when mothers’ reading skills were not included, and
thus, this interpretation cannot explain the lack of associations between shared book
reading and children’s outcomes in families in the urban group.
Second, the significant effect of meaning-related HLE on children’s outcomes
reported in previous studies (e.g., Hood etal., 2008; Inoue etal., 2018; Puglisi etal.,
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
1 3
2017) may have been driven by the inclusion of “number of children’s books” in the
meaning-related HLE factor, and the effect of shared book reading alone may not
survive when access to literacy resources is included separately in the same model
(for similar results, see Inoue etal., 2020; Wang & Liu, 2021; Zhang etal., 2020).
Third, the type and quality of shared book reading rather than its quantity (i.e., fre-
quency) may be more important in fostering children’s language and literacy out-
comes. Because we focused on the frequency of parent–child reading activities in
the study, we cannot rule out the possibility that the potential role of a particular
type of shared book reading, such as dialogic/interactive reading (e.g., Chow etal.,
2008; Murray etal., 2023; see Pillinger & Vardy, 2022, for a systematic review),
may not have been captured by our HLE questionnaire.
Next, in contrast to our hypothesis and to the findings of van Bergen etal. (2015),
the direct effect of mothers’ reading skills on children’s reading skills was not sig-
nificant after controlling for the effects of HLE, parents’ education, and children’s
emergent literacy skills. In addition, the effect of mothers’ reading skills was fully
mediated by children’s vocabulary (in the urban group) and phonological awareness
(in the rural group). This discrepancy in the findings may be due to the differences
in the age of our participants (the participants in van Bergen etal.’s study were chil-
dren between the ages of 6 and 16, while ours were kindergarteners), the reading
measures for mothers and children (van Bergen etal. used a reading fluency meas-
ure for both parents and children, while we used word reading and reading compre-
hension measures for mothers and single- and two-character word reading measures
for children), or both. In fact, a behavioral genetics study (Tosto etal., 2017) has
reported that the heritability of reading fluency is high and largely stable across the
ages of 7–16.
However, an alternative explanation for the discrepancy may be the inclusion of
broader emergent literacy skills in our study. More specifically, while the intergen-
erational model in van Bergen etal.’s study included phonological awareness, RAN,
and visual attention span as the potential mediators in the relationships between
parents’ reading skills and children’s reading skills, our model included pinyin let-
ter knowledge, phonological awareness, RAN, and vocabulary. Indeed, our results
showed that the strongest correlations of mothers’ reading skills were observed for
children’s vocabulary in both groups (see Table2). These results suggest that moth-
ers’ reading skills may not be directly and independently associated with children’s
word reading skills when wider indirect pathways through various emergent literacy
skills, including vocabulary, are taken into account.
Finally, the associations between HLE and children’s emergent literacy skills
were very similar in the two groups, except that direct teaching was associated with
RAN only in the rural group. Given that we used a digit naming task to assess chil-
dren’s RAN in the study, the stronger association between direct teaching and RAN
in the rural group may be due to the fact that parents taught their children not only
Chinese characters and pinyin letters but also numbers (see e.g., Napoli & Purpura,
2018; Skwarchuk etal., 2014, for correlations between parental teaching of literacy
and numeracy at home), which may have given them an advantage in the RAN task
that used numbers as the stimuli. On the other hand, children in the urban group may
have learned numbers more through the literacy resources available in the home, as
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1 3
Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
indicated by the association between access to literacy resources and RAN in the
urban group (see Fig.2).
In contrast to HLE, whereas mothers’ reading skills were only associated with
children’s vocabulary in the urban group, they were associated with phonological
awareness, RAN, and vocabulary in the rural group. These results are consistent
with our hypothesis and suggest that the effects of mothers’ reading skills may be
relatively more pronounced among families from socioeconomically disadvantaged
contexts because they have limited learning resources at home compared to their
peers from more affluent contexts (e.g., Gao etal., 2021; Leng etal., 2023; see also
Nag etal., 2019). Importantly, our results suggest that the mothers of children with
poorer reading skills, and therefore most in need of support, are also likely to have
insufficient reading skills, which, in turn, may be related to their children’s poorer
phonological awareness and vocabulary. In other words, mothers in socioeconomi-
cally disadvantaged contexts may also be “in need” of support for their reading
skills. However, it should be noted that none of the differences in the associations
between mothers’ reading skills and children’s emergent literacy skills were statisti-
cally significant between the two groups, indicating that their associations may be
largely comparable across the families from the two contexts.
Our study has some limitations worth reporting. First, this is a correlational study
using cross-sectional data, and any significant effects do not imply causation. Future
longitudinal studies should replicate our results to further clarify the directionality
of the associations between the variables. Second, we only assessed mothers’ read-
ing skills as a proxy for genetic confounds in the association between HLE and chil-
dren’s outcomes. Even though our intention was to test both mothers’ and fathers’
reading skills, most fathers in the small towns of Luqiao and Mapo were working
away and could not be tested. Future studies should assess both mothers’ and fathers’
reading skills to best tag the child’s genetic liability. It is also important to note that
including parental reading ability in a model alone may not allow us to control for
all gene-environment correlations (e.g., active, passive, and evocative gene-environ-
ment correlations; see Plomin, 1990; van Bergen etal., 2014) that may confound the
relationship between HLE and children’s reading ability. In fact, the Familial Con-
trol Method used in our study has been proposed as a workaround for when geneti-
cally sensitive data (e.g., twin samples, polygenic scores) are unavailable (Hart etal.,
2021). Therefore, we acknowledge that our results should be viewed with caution.
Third, as discussed above, we assessed both code-related and meaning-related HLE
(direct teaching and shared book reading, respectively) in terms of their frequency.
This may have reduced the effects of HLE on children’s outcomes observed in our
analyses. Future studies are required to establish if our results replicate when both
quantity (i.e., frequency of activity) and quality (i.e., type of activity) of the HLE
activities are taken into account. Fourth, parents’ reporting of the retrospective esti-
mates of HLE activities could have been biased by current home activities, which
could also have been associated with current children’s skills. Future studies should
consider collecting more objective and potentially less biased information on HLE
activities by directly observing what parents do with their children in a more natural
setting (see e.g., Hindman etal., 2013; Skibbe et al., 2013). Finally, our findings
may not generalize to other languages and sociolinguistic contexts. This is important
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S.-Z.Zhang et al.
1 3
Fig. 2 The Models for the Relationship between Mothers’ Reading Skills, Home Literacy Environment,
and Children’s Reading Skills in the Urban and Rural Groups. Note. WR = word reading; SV = sentence
verification; RAN = rapid automatized naming; CR = character recognition. Nonsignificant paths are esti-
mated but not shown for clarity purposes
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1 3
Examining therelations betweenmothers’ reading skills,…
to keep in mind in view of evidence that socioeconomically disadvantaged environ-
ments are not uniformly constraining, as some other family factors (e.g., parental
attitudes toward homework and school) may mitigate negative effects (Nag et al.,
2019).
To conclude, the present study examined the relationship between mothers’ read-
ing skills, HLE, and children’s emergent literacy skills and word reading in sam-
ples of families from urban and rural contexts in China. The results indicate that
direct teaching (code-related HLE) predicts pinyin knowledge, and access to lit-
eracy resources predicts phonological awareness and vocabulary after controlling
for mothers’ reading skills in both groups. Moreover, mothers’ reading skills were
associated with children’s word reading indirectly through vocabulary and phono-
logical awareness, and the associations between mothers’ reading skills, HLE, and
children’s emergent literacy skills were largely similar across the two groups. The
findings add to the existing literature on the role of HLE in language and literacy
development by revealing that HLE exerts its effects on children’s emergent literacy
skills and word reading across different contexts, even after controlling for a genetic
confound using mothers’ reading skills.
Data availability All analysis codes and results are available at https:// osf. io/ zuk9x/, and the data that
support the findings of the study are available on request from the corresponding author.
Declarations
Conflict of interest On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of
interest.
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