AI Pre-Literacy: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Children's Emerging Relationship with Artificial Intelligence

This preprint introduces AI Pre-Literacy as a new conceptual construct to understand children's emerging relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life. While AI literacy frameworks focus on what learners should know, use, and critically evaluate about AI, this paper argues that younger children develop foundational orientations toward AI before formal literacy — through encountering, noticing, representing, interpreting, and orienting toward AI-mediated phenomena (educational tech, conversational agents, smart devices, games, and robots). Based on a structured conceptual mapping of seven relevant research traditions and drawing on the analogy with emergent literacy (Clay, 1966; Teale & Sulzby, 1986), the paper proposes: Table 1: Representative research traditions relevant to AI pre-literacy Table 2: Four provisional dimensions (AI-related vocabulary, imaginative & cognitive sense-making, attitudes & perceptions, emerging socio-ethical awareness) Figure 1: Relational model showing AI pre-literacy and AI literacy as analytically distinct but bidirectionally interacting constructs within AI-mediated environments. This is a conceptual paper, not an empirical study. It offers a provisional framework to guide future research, tool design, and early childhood pedagogy. Copyright: © 2026 Pasha & Pasha. Licensed under CC BY 4.0DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22023810Suggested Citation: Pasha, M. A. R., & Pasha, S. (2026). AI Pre-Literacy: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Children's Emerging Relationship with Artificial Intelligence. Zenodo Preprint. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22023810Version: 1.1 (Final with DOI and Figure 1 corrected)Keywords: AI pre-literacy, AI literacy, early childhood, critical AI literacy