A Preliminary Examination of Vocabulary and Word Learning in African American Toddlers From Middle and Low Socioeconomic Status Homes

Abstract

The influence of socioeconomic background on African American children's lexical semantic tasks varies with the type of measure used.

Interactive Book Reading to Accelerate Word Learning by Kindergarten Children With Specific Language Impairment: Identifying an Adequate Intensity and Variation in Treatment Response

“…Moreover, intensities that are effective for children with low vocabulary due to differences in input (i.e., children from low-income homes) are unlikely to be adequate for children with SLI. Low-income children do not appear to have deficits in learning characteristic of SLI (Horton-Ikard & Weismer, 2007). Taken together, it is unclear what intensity of interactive book reading would be adequate for children with SLI.…”

Word Learning During Reading: Effects of Language Ability in School-Age Children

“…First, asking students to generate definitions would have called greater attention to the words, thus detracting from the study's intended focus on incidental word learning during reading. Second, previous findings suggest receptive measures are more sensitive when assessing early word knowledge growth than expressive measures (e.g., Horton-Ikard & Ellis Weismer, 2007).…”

Part-term learning of preschool children with low socioeconomic status

“…Several research groups have raised the need for culturally and linguistically fair assessments for the purpose of diagnosis of language impairment, particularly for speakers of a non-mainstream dialect (Craig & Washington, 2000;de Villiers, 2004;Horton-Ikard & Ellis Weismer, 2007). Recommendations have been made for the use of measures derived from spontaneous language samples to diagnose language impairment (Craig & Washington, 2000;Dunn, Flax, Sliwinski, & Aram, 1996); analysis of the language samples of participants may shed light on this issue.…”

“…Children from low SES families have scores on norm-referenced measures that are substantially lower than the normative sample, ranging from .5 to 1.5 standard deviations below the normative mean (Hadley, Simmerman, Long, & Luna, 2000;Hart & Risley, 1995;Horton-Ikard & Ellis Weismer, 2007;Qi, Kaiser, Milan, & Hancock, 2006;Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 1991;Whitehurst, 1997). For example, in the Qi et al (2006) study of nearly 500 preschool children from low SES families, means on the PPVT-III for African…”

“…Horton-Ikard and Ellis Weismer (2007) provided an examination of word learning in children from low SES families (PPVT-III M = 92.73, SD = 7.24).…”