Money talks.
Author | Lapin, Lisa |
Position | ECONOMIC OBSERVER |
FIFTY YEARS of research has revealed the sad truth that children of lower-income, less-educated parents typically enter school with poorer language skills than their more-privileged counterparts. By some measures, five-year-olds of lower socioeconomic status score more than two years behind on standardized language development tests by the time they enter school.
Stanford University researchers, however, have found that these socioeconomic status (SES) differences begin to emerge much earlier in life: by 18 months of age, toddlers from disadvantaged families already are several months behind more-advantaged children in language proficiency. The study, published in Developmental Science, is the first to identify an "achievement gap" in language processing skill at such a young age and could inform strategies to intervene and bring children up to speed.
In an experiment designed to investigate children's vocabulary and language processing speed, Anne Fernald, associate professor of psychology, enrolled 20 children, 18 months old, who lived near the Stanford campus, and tested how quickly and accurately they identified objects based on simple verbal cues. Follow-up tests six months later measured how these skills developed.
Research conducted in university laboratories commonly relies on a "convenience sample" of local participants who usually are affluent and highly educated. Since children in these higher SES families have many other advantages as well, the results of such research do not represent the majority of children living in less-privileged circumstances in the U.S.
To include a broader range of children in her research, Fernald took her lab on the road. She duplicated the experimental setup of her Stanford-based lab in a 30-foot-long RV and drove to a city a few hours north of campus, where the median household income and education levels are much lower, on average, than in the Bay Area. The researchers recruited another 28 toddlers, aged roughly 18 months, from this lower SES population and performed the same experiments as they had on campus. Then they retested the children six months later when they turned two years old to see how they had progressed.
Fernald has devised a test for measuring toddlers' language processing speed. Sitting on their mother's lap, the kids are shown two images: for instance, a dog and a ball. A recorded voice instructs the toddler to "look at the ball" while a high-definition video camera records the...
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