Sagt das Emotionswissen von jungen Kindern ihre phonologische Bewusstheit im Entwicklungsverlauf voraus?

Background: Numerous studies have confirmed that young children’s phonological awareness aids them in learning to read and to write in primary school. A meta-analysis of 21 studies from German-speaking countries indicated a longitudinal correlation of r = .31 between phonological awareness and indicators of reading, writing, and spelling in German. The positive effect of phonological awareness was also established in intervention studies, and it held true for native speakers of German as well as for German language learners. Phonological awareness is thus an important indicator of young children’s pre-academic abilities. Children’s cognitive abilities, language skills, and behavioral self-regulation as well as their families’ socioeconomic status (SES) and migration to Germany have been established as predictors of their phonological awareness. Between 3 and 6 years of age, young children’s knowledge about their own emotions and those of others develops in rapid strides and helps them take advantage of opportunities for learning. One cross-sectional study confirmed that young children’s emotion knowledge contributes to the explanation of their phonological awareness above and beyond some of these well-known predictors. The current longitudinal study therefore asked whether young children’s emotion knowledge contributes to the prediction of their later phonological awareness in an incremental way when all rival predictors were included. Methods: In a longitudinal study, children from northern Germany (N = 280, mean age T1 = 49.8 months) were interviewed individually about their emotion knowledge, their nonverbal cognitive abilities, their understanding of sentences, and their behavioral self-regulation at T1. About a year later, at T2, their phonological awareness was assessed. Results: Two hierarchical regressions showed that two indicators of children’s emotion knowledge explained additional variance in their later phonological awareness above and beyond their family’s immigration status and SES, and their own age, nonverbal intelligence, sentence understanding, and behavioral self-regulation (R2 = .44 and .45). Conclusions: The incremental effect of emotion knowledge confirms and extends earlier research using different measures of emotion knowledge and phonological awareness. Relevance: The results also underline the hitherto understudied social nature of learning pre-academic abilities which tend to influence children’s academic careers for years thereafter.