Deparment of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Biruni University, İstanbul, Turkey.
Deparment of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Hacettepe University Ankara, Ankara, Turkey.
PLoS One. 2024 Oct 29;19(10):e0310114. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310114. eCollection 2024.
Early literacy skills, the foundational abilities necessary for the development of literacy, must be examined holistically in preschool children. This study aimed to investigate early literacy skills in preschool children and determine how variables related to literacy development can be clustered by using a dendrogram. The study was conducted on 166 preschool children (75 female, 91 male; mean age: 65.9±4.4 months). Hierarchical cluster analysis (CA) was used to find the variable clustering trends. The 44 variables related to literacy (sociodemographic factors related to the child and family, child-parent relationship, child's behavior, and social, sensory integration, motor, and auditory linguistic skills) that were closest to each other in the dendrogram were clustered, and the situation was summarized by reducing them to two main clusters and six sub-clusters. This study elaborates on the implications of reducing multivariate complexity using CA. It is recommended that the relationships among the variables in this dendrogram structure are considered when new hypotheses and studies related to early literacy are designed.
早期读写技能是儿童发展读写能力所必需的基础能力，必须对学龄前儿童进行全面评估。本研究旨在调查学龄前儿童的早期读写技能，并确定如何通过使用聚类树状图来聚类与读写发展相关的变量。该研究对 166 名学龄前儿童（75 名女性，91 名男性；平均年龄：65.9±4.4 个月）进行了研究。采用分层聚类分析（CA）来寻找变量聚类趋势。最接近聚类树状图中的彼此的 44 个与读写相关的变量（与儿童和家庭相关的社会人口因素、亲子关系、儿童行为以及社会、感觉统合、运动和听觉语言技能）被聚类，并通过将它们减少到两个主要聚类和六个子聚类来总结情况。本研究详细阐述了使用 CA 减少多元复杂性的意义。建议在设计与早期读写相关的新假设和研究时，考虑该聚类树状图结构中变量之间的关系。
