ABSTRACT
Several challenges arise when researchers or practitioners attempt to assess the literacy skills of toddlers, including a lack of developmentally appropriate measures, toddlers' more limited communication ability, and how literacy is defined in the years before age three. This paper describes four new measures of early literacy development and provides preliminary evidence of their reliability and validity. Results show that the measures of Representational Knowledge, Concepts About Symbols, Book Handling Skills, and Environmental Symbols all performed well in a sample of 148 toddlers. The findings hold several implications for the study of the literacy development of toddlers.
