Fostering Broad Oral Language Skills in Preschoolers from Low SES Background

Abstract

Socioeconomic disparities increase the probability that children will enter school behind their more advantaged peers. Early intervention on language skills may enhance language and literacy outcomes, reduce the gap and, eventually, promote school readiness of low-SES (Socioeconomic Status) children. This study aimed to analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of a brief narrative-based intervention (treatment vs. control group) aimed to foster broad oral language skills in preschoolers (N = 69; Mean age = 5.5, SD = 4 months) coming from low-SES families. Moreover, it was analyzed whether children’s initial vocabulary mediates the intervention’s responsiveness. Results have shown that children in treatment group obtained greater gains than children in control group in almost all intervention-based measures. There is also some evidence for the generalizability of the intervention to other skills not directly trained during the intervention. Moreover, it was found that children’s initial vocabulary mediates the intervention’s responsiveness showing that children with high vocabulary made greater gains in higher-level components of language comprehension, whereas children with low vocabulary made higher gains in vocabulary. Taken together, our findings suggest that a relatively brief, but quite intensive narrative-based intervention, may produce improvements on broad oral language skills in preschoolers from low-SES backgrounds.

Home Language Activities and Expressive Vocabulary of Toddlers from Low-SES Monolingual Families and Bilingual Immigrant Families

“…Conceptual knowledge of the words is common to different languages, and increasing conceptual knowledge in one or the other language may favor vocabulary acquisition in both languages. Evidence of the importance of working on cognitive and linguistic competencies that are deemed to be part of the CUP is provided by the fact that a recent intervention, combining shared book-reading and vocabulary instruction, increased vocabulary knowledge in low-SES preschool children [ 49 ].…”

The Native Speaker in Italian-Dialects Bilingualism: Insights From the Acquisition of Vicentino by Preschool Children

“…To date, studies have indicated that the quantity of language exposure is a crucial factor in language development. The quantity of language exposure has been reported to significantly influence the size of children’s vocabularies ( Hoff et al, 2014 ) as well as the morpho-syntactic development and language proficiency ( Hoff, 2015 ; Dicataldo et al, 2020 ). Since microstructure measures of bilingual narratives also reflect the lexical and morpho-syntactic development of each of their languages, we hypothesize that we will detect the effect more in the microstructure than in the macrostructure.…”

Preliminary feasibility and effectiveness of a novel community language intervention for preschool children in the United Kingdom

“…There is generally a lack of information about the active ingredients of speech and language interventions for children, although some possible elements that have been identified are active child engagement in the intervention (Schmitt, 2020), recasting (McKean & Frizelle, 2022) and contingent interaction (Mathews et al., 2017). In general, intervention studies also often lack control groups (Kwok et al., 2020; Target Word ), are aimed at children over 3 (Dicataldo et al., 2020; Walker et al., 2020) or are very small case series that cannot be analysed statistically (McDonald et al., 2019; Home Talk; n = 9 ). All of these are problematic design features given the rapid changes and wide individual differences often seen at this age.…”