Letter knowledge in light of bilingualism and socioeconomic status

Letter knowledge is one of the key components ofliteracy skills and a predictor of academic success.The present study explores how letter knowledge ofpreschool children is related to their language group(bilingual vs. monolingual) and socioeconomic status(SES) (mid-high vs. low). Forty-six monolingualHebrew and 48 bilingual Russian-Hebrew childrenwith a mean age of 5.8 years from mid-high and lowSES backgrounds performed a set of Hebrew letterknowledge tasks that differed in their degree ofcomplexity (letter discrimination, letter recognitionout of symbols and letter naming). The results demon-strate that language group and SES are important pre-dictors of letter knowledge performance on the highercomplexity task (letter naming) but have no impact onperformance on the lower complexity tasks (letterdiscrimination and letter recognition out of symbols).The discussion will focus on the employment of differ-ent levels of letter knowledge tasks with respect to chil-dren’s language group and SES.