Children from low-income backgrounds consistently perform below their more advantaged peers on standardized measures of language ability, setting long-term trajectories that translate into gaps in academic achievement. Our primary goals in this review are to describe how and why this is so, in order to focus attention on ways to enrich early language experiences across socioeconomic strata. We first review the literature on the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and language ability across domains in early childhood. We then identify three potential pathways by which SES might influence language development-child characteristics, parent-child interaction, and availability of learning resources-recognizing the complicated interaction between the child's own language learning skill and his/her environmental support. Finally, we review interventions that target these three pathways with an eye toward best practice. Future research should focus on the diversity of contexts in which children acquire language and adopt methods of language measurement that are sensitive to cultural variation.
Methods can powerfully affect conclusions about infant experiences and learning. Data from naturalistic observations may paint a very different picture of learning and development than those based on structured tasks, as illustrated in studies of infant walking, object permanence, intention understanding, and so forth. Using language as a model system, we compared the speech of 40 mothers to their 13-month old infants during structured play and naturalistic home routines. The contrasting methods yielded unique portrayals of infant language experiences, while simultaneously underscoring cross-situational correspondence at an individual level. Infants experienced substantially more total words and different words per minute during structured play than they did during naturalistic routines. Language input during structured play was consistently dense from minute to minute, whereas language during naturalistic routines showed striking fluctuations interspersed with silence. Despite these differences, infants’ language experiences during structured play mirrored the peak language interactions infants experienced during naturalistic routines, and correlations between language inputs in the two conditions were strong. The implications of developmental methods for documenting the nature of experiences and individual differences are discussed.
The authors examined children's access to books in 153 four‐year‐olds from low‐income, U.S. ethnic‐minority families. Mothers reported on the number of books available to their children and the variety of books their children had, such as concept books about letters, numbers, and shapes and narrative books about cultural beliefs and relationships. Mothers also reported on the frequency of mother–child book‐sharing interactions. The authors coded characteristics of book‐sharing interactions from videos of mother–child sharing of a wordless book. Most children had a variety of concept books but few narrative books. Children who were later born and who had English‐speaking (vs. Spanish‐speaking) parents had a greater variety of narrative books than did their counterparts, and children living with their father and mother had a greater variety of narrative and concept books than those who did not reside with their father. The variety of narrative books predicted children's narrative contributions during book sharing through the mediator of mothers’ questions about the story. In contrast, the variety of concept books predicted children's referential contributions (e.g., “That's a tree”) through the mediator of mothers’ referential questions (e.g., “What's that?”). Household composition, home language use, and the content of books shape the early literacy experiences of children from low‐income, ethnic‐minority families.
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