| Summary: | In order for children to succeed in school, they need to use relational reasoning to draw comparisons, make inferences, use hierarchies, and develop abstractions. Although this higher order thinking has been cited as necessary for school success, its early development has not been described. Further, as the home linguistic environment is widely variable and has strong association with educational outcomes, the current study used data from spontaneous parent-child interactions to investigate higher order thinking in the pre-school period. Specifically, this paper reports on the development of higher order thinking in young children. Using a longitudinal dataset of spontaneous parent-child talk as well as other outcomes, this project describes the development of higher order thinking language in young children along with the use of higher order thinking language in their parents as well as the effects of parental speech and gesture on children's higher order thinking. The findings of children's development of higher order thinking show that surface higher order thinking occurs before structure higher order thinking, that children use more statements than questions involving higher order thinking, and that there were more non-academic domain utterances of higher order thinking than those in the academic domains. Additionally, parents and children followed similar trajectories with regard to use of higher order thinking when children were between 14 and 58 months old. By carefully describing the parental behaviors that encourage higher order thinking in young children, interventions for parents and preschool teachers can be designed to promote this important type of thinking.
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