The promotion of parent-child shared book reading for the development of children’s literacy is a vital component of early literacy evidence-based recommendations. A robust body of research demonstrates that, regardless of socioeconomic status, parent-child shared book reading promotes monolingual children’s literacy. However, despite the growing population of heritage language learners in the United States, those who grow up in homes where a familial language is spoken but receive English instruction at school, parent-child shared book reading research among heritage language learners remains scarce. Further, the impact of parent-child shared book reading is likely to alter the influence of family’s socioeconomic status on heritage language learners’ emergent literacy development. Here, parent-child shared book reading and children’s emergent literacy were examined using latent variable path analyses in a national sample of 965 heritage language learners ages 2 to 6 years old. Parent-child shared book reading mediated the effect of socioeconomic status on heritage language learners’ emergent literacy.

The present study examined the effect of children’s enrollment in U.S. dual-language immersion (DLI) programs in first grade on English development across five years, using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2011 (ECLS-K:2011) database. Propensity score matching was used to create comparable groups of DLI and non-DLI students based on students’ kindergarten reading performance and a series of student-, family-, and school-level characteristics. Growth curve models demonstrate that first-grade DLI enrollment had a positive effect on children’s English reading growth from Grade 1 to 5. Children who enrolled in DLI experienced greater improvements by Grade 5. We also found that first-grade teacher judgment was related to children’s initial reading performance but not their reading growth. Implications related to DLI programs, teacher practices, and bilingual educational policies are discussed.

Orthographic depth, the consistency and complexity of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, influences brain activation in multilinguals’ first (L1) and second language (L2). The intrinsic functional connectivity of cross-language transfer was investigated between two groups of multilinguals, those whose L2 orthography is deeper than their L1 (S-to-D group) and those whose L2 orthography is shallower than their L1 (D-to-S group). Based on previous reports, we focused on two seed regions: the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) and the left posterior supramarginal gyrus (pSMG). Group comparisons revealed stronger connectivity for the D-to-S group between the left pSMG and the right precuneus/cuneal cortex and the right SMG/angular gyrus. Moreover, we found that the greater the linguistic orthographic distance—the less similar in orthographic depth two languages are—the greater the negative connectivity between the left pSMG and the right pSMG, middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and frontal pole, and a cluster that included the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis, frontal operculum, and insular cortex. When linguistic distance was greater, there was also greater negative connectivity between the VWFA and the left precuneus. Furthermore, stronger connectivity was found between the left pSMG and the right precuneus in multilinguals who spoke at least three languages (trilinguals) compared to those who only spoke two languages (bilinguals). Follow-up analyses revealed that this difference was driven by stronger intrinsic connectivity in D-to-S trilinguals compared to the S-to-D trilinguals. Taken together, the findings of this study suggest that multilinguals’ intrinsic functional connectivity is shaped by the orthographic depth of their L2 in relation to L1, as well as differences between bilingualism and trilingualism.