Identifying Pathways Between Socioeconomic Status and Language Development

Abstract

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.

Socioeconomic Inequality and the Developing Brain: Spotlight on Language and Executive Function

“…These studies revealed variation in the magnitude of associations across tasks, with stronger associations for language and executive function (EF) than for other neurocognitive skills (Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007;Noble, Norman, & Farah, 2005). In line with these results, evidence points to large socioeconomic differences in language comprehension and production (e.g., expressive and receptive vocabulary, grammar, phonological awareness), along with moderate to large differences in EF skills, including inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility (Lawson, Hook, & Farah, 2017;Pace, Luo, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2017).…”

“…In follow‐up work, 3‐year‐olds from lower income families had less than half the vocabulary of their counterparts from higher income families. With these findings replicated in numerous studies, converging evidence indicates that SES‐based variability in linguistic stimulation in the home (especially the quality of language input) accounts partially for socioeconomic differences in children's language development (Pace et al., ). Echoing these behavioral findings, in a recent study using fMRI, less advantaged parents had fewer conversational exchanges with their 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds than more advantaged parents.…”

Child‐Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager‐Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study

“…This heterogeneous factor has been discussed repeatedly in the literature on language acquisition, saliently in Hart and Risley (), who focused on English‐learning American infants, but also in much other work, for instance, that documenting variation among infants growing up in Guatemalan rural households (Klein et al., ). There are numerous pathways through which SES could potentially account for structured variance in input quantity (see Pace, Luo, Hirsh‐Pasek, & Golinkoff, ; Schwab & Lew‐Williams, for recent reviews). To mention just three, all else equal: (a) families with lower SES may experience harsher living conditions, with negative consequences for their emotional well‐being leading to poorer infant–caretaker attachment (e.g., Hackman, Farah, & Meaney, , p. 653 ff.…”

Maternal Language and Child Vocabulary Mediate Relations Between Socioeconomic Status and Executive Function During Early Childhood

“…Understanding variation in mothers' language input is critical because a wealth of evidence suggests that maternal language input is associated with children's vocabulary development (Pace, Luo, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2017). For instance, children of mothers who use a higher number of word types, meaning more diverse vocabularies, are more likely to have larger vocabularies (Bornstein, Haynes, & Painter, 1998;Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991;Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005).…”