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Language Development: Influence of Socio-Economic Status
Language Development: Influence of Socio-Economic Status Erika Hoff and Krystal M Ribot, Florida Atlantic University, Davie, FL, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract Family socioeconomic status (SES) is related to language development in multiple domains, throughout childhood, and in adulthood as well. Children from lower SES homes show lower levels of language and communicative skill than children from higher SES homes beginning in infancy. The gap between lower and higher SES children persists and sometimes widens with age. Substantial evidence locates the source of these differences in children’s language experience. Children from lower SES homes are talked to less, and the speech they hear is less supportive of language development. The evidence that SESrelated differences in parents’ speech cause SES-related differences in children’s language development is consistent with theoretical approaches that give experience an important role in the language acquisition process.
The goal of this article is to summarize the evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) is related to language development and to review the literature that explains why SES has this effect. Family SES is a powerful predictor of many aspects of child development and, relatedly, of many aspects of parenting behavior (Hoff et al., 2002; Keating and Hertzman, 1999; Linver et al., 2002; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000). This article focuses on the relation of SES to children’s language development and to the antecedent SES-related differences in how parents use language in interaction with their children. The first section of this article provides a definition of SES. The second and third sections review the evidence that SES influences children’s language acquisition and does so via the influence of SES-related differences in the speech adults address to children. A final section considers the theoretical implications of the observed relations among SES, language experience, and language development.
Definitions of Socioeconomic Status SES refers to an individual’s or household’s relative position in a social hierarchy. Traditionally, this hierarchy has been defined in terms of access to, or control over, wealth, prestige, and power (Mueller and Parcel, 1981). More recently, SES has been conceptualized in terms of three sorts of capital or resources that families have access to: financial capital (material resources), human capital (nonmaterial resources, such as knowledge and skills), and social capital (connections to a larger social group) (Coleman, 1988). Researchers have measured SES using indicators of parents’ level of education, household income, and prestige of occupation, or using a composite index based on multiple indicators (Hoff et al., 2012). Each component of SES may be associated with some level of risk for poor developmental outcomes because both US and international data suggest that greater disparities and/or greater predictive power are associated with the use of multiple indicators (Fernald et al., 2011; Halle et al., 2009). Often, however, research has used maternal education as the sole index of SES on the logic that education is highly correlated with other measures, is stable,
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and appears to be the best single predictor of child outcomes (Hoff et al., 2012). Furthermore, some research indicates that outside of extreme poverty, maternal education is the component of SES most strongly related to parenting measures (Bornstein et al., 2003; Hoff et al., 2002).
Relations between SES and Language Development Throughout childhood, higher SES children have more advanced language skills than lower SES children of the same age. SES-related differences in children’s communicative behavior have been found as early as infancy, are consistently found in the preschool and school-age years, and appear in adulthood as well. For instance, Halle et al.’s (2009) study of a nationally representative sample of approximately 11 000 infants born in the United States in 2001 found SES disparities in language skills (e.g., expressive vocalization and naming objects) in infants as early as 9 months of age, and the SES-related disparities widen by 24 months of age (e.g., in receptive and expressive vocabulary and listening/ comprehension). In a public school sample, Oller and Eilers (2002) found SES-related differences in kindergarten and 5th grade children’s scores on standardized tests of oral vocabulary equal to almost one standard deviation. Among adults, Hoff-Ginsberg (1991) found that education level was related to the amount of speech, the lexical richness, and the syntactic complexity of utterances that mothers addressed to an interviewer, and Van den Broeck (1977) found education level was related to the syntactic complexity of the speech used by adults in conversation. SES-related differences in children’s language skill have been observed across multiple domains of language including vocabulary, grammar, communication, narrative skill, phonological awareness, and processing speed.
SES Differences in Vocabulary A difference in vocabulary size is the most reliably observed SES-related difference in language skill. A vocabulary gap has been found as early as the toddler years (Halle et al., 2009; Hart and Risley, 1995). The gap further widens by age 4 and then
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 13
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Language Development: Influence of Socio-Economic Status
remains fairly stable through the school years (Farkas and Beron, 2004). The magnitude of differences related to SES can be large. Hart and Risley (1995) found that by 3 years of age, the mean cumulative recorded vocabulary for the higher SES children in that sample was over 1000 words while for the lower SES children it was close to 500; SES accounted for 36% of variance in vocabulary in this sample. Arriaga et al. (1998) found that 80% of a sample of low-SES children between 18 and 30 months scored below the 50th percentile in productive vocabulary, using a test normed on a mid- to high-SES reference group. Comparing children of collegeeducated mothers to children of high school-educated mothers, Hoff-Ginsberg (1998) found SES-related differences in the size of the vocabularies they used in spontaneous speech. SES accounted for 5% of the variance in children’s vocabulary in this sample. Other studies using spontaneous speech, maternal report measures, and standardized tests show similar findings, with the magnitude of the SES-related differences depending on the range of SES in the sample studied (Dollaghan et al., 1999; Pan et al., 2005; Rescorla, 1989). For example, SES accounted for less than 1% of the variance in vocabulary assessed via maternal report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) in a fairly homogeneous, middle-class sample (Fenson et al., 1994). Snow (1999) reported that SES differences are greater for measures of productive vocabulary than comprehension vocabulary, but Wells (1986) reported that the clearest SES-related difference is in oral comprehension. These vocabulary differences have long-term consequences. Vocabulary is a fundamental predictor of school success, and vocabulary deficits are one of the primary reasons that lower SES children enter school at greater risk for failure than their high-SES peers (Snow et al., 1998).
SES Differences in Grammar SES-related differences in grammatical development have also been found. Children from higher social strata have been found to produce longer responses to adult speech (McCarthy, 1930), score higher on standardized tests that include measures of grammatical development (Dollaghan et al., 1999), produce more complex utterances in spontaneous speech as toddlers (Arriaga et al., 1998) and at age 5 years (Snow, 1999), and perform significantly better on measures of productive and receptive syntax at age 6 years (Huttenlocher et al., 2002). As an indicator of the magnitude of these effects on grammatical development, the low-income sample studied by Snow (1999) had an average mean utterance length (MLU) at age 3;9 that would be typical of children more than a year younger according to norms based on a middle-class sample. At age 5;6, they had an average MLU typical of middle-class children aged 3;1. Arriaga et al. (1998) found that 70% of low-income children were below the 50th percentile on the MCDI measure of sentence complexity. The SES-related differences are not in whether or not children can use complex structures in their speech, but in the frequency with which they do so (Huttenlocher et al., 2002; Tough, 1982). Effects of SES on grammatical development are not as large or reliable as effects on vocabulary; some studies have found no
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relation between SES and measures of children’s syntactic development (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Hoff and Tian, 2005; Jackson and Roberts, 2001; Noble et al., 2005). A reason for these inconsistent findings is suggested by the finding in Vasilyeva et al. (2008) that SES was not related to measures of early mastery of basic syntactic rules but was related – in the same sample of children – to later differences in the use of more complex structures.
SES Differences in Communication Studies of school-aged children find SES-related differences in the communicative purposes to which language is put, such that children with less educated parents less frequently use language to analyze and reflect, to reason and justify, or to predict and consider alternative possibilities than children with more educated parents. It has been suggested that the structural differences in children’s language associated with SES may be a by-product of these functional differences (Tough, 1982). In an early sociological analysis of class and language, Bernstein (1970) similarly argued that higher and lower SES children do not differ in language knowledge but the differences in the communicative burden carried by language give rise to differences in the amount, the structure, and the lexical repertoire of the speech produced. SES-related differences in school-aged children also appear in the ability to communicate meaning through language and to draw meaning from language – sometimes referred to as speaker and listener skills (Lloyd et al., 1998). In the referential communication task, which requires children to describe one item in an array of objects so that a visually separated listener with the same array can identify that item, lower SES children are less able than higher SES children to produce sufficiently informative messages and to use information in messages addressed to them to make correct choices (Lloyd et al., 1998). Children from lower socioeconomic strata also perform less well than higher SES children in solving mathematics word problems. That some of this difference is attributable to language ability, not mathematical ability, is suggested by evidence from one sample of lower SES children who showed poorer performance than higher SES children in word problems and in tests of verbal skills but who did not differ in their performance in math calculations (Jordan et al., 1992). In sum, the findings are clear that children from different socioeconomic strata display different levels of language skill across multiple domains of language. It is also true that the specifics of SES-language relations and the size of the effects depend on the particular language outcome and the range of SES under consideration.
Other SES-Related Differences In addition to these SES-related differences in vocabulary, grammar, and communication, there are SES-related differences in children’s narrative skills, in their phonological awareness, and in their speed of language processing. The narratives produced by lower SES children are less sophisticated than the narratives produced by middle-class children of the same age, when assessed in terms of topic coherence and
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independence from the nonlinguistic context (Heath, 1983; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2001). Lower SES children show lower levels of phonological awareness than middle-class children, with the size of the SES-related difference increasing from the age of 2 to 5 years (Bowey, 1995; Lonigan et al., 1998; McDowell et al., 2007). Lower SES children are also slower in accessing the words they know (Fernald et al., 2012). In sum, a substantial body of evidence argues that the effect of SES on children’s early language skills is pervasive and robust. The size of the effect differs depending on the range of SES being considered, the age of the children, and the aspect of language under consideration, but differences as large as 1 standard deviation are frequently observed and larger differences are also possible. Using age as a measure of the size of the SES-related difference, there are findings that children from low-income backgrounds are a year or more behind their middle-class counterparts (e.g., Snow, 1999). It is important to note that neither low- nor high-SES children are monolithic in their language skill, that substantial individual differences exist within both populations, and that the distributions of skills among lower and higher SES children overlap (Hoff, 2003a,b; Pan et al., 2005). It is also important to note that low-SES children have unique linguistic strengths that are not captured by the procedures and tests most frequently used in research. Arguments for the unique skills of lower SES children tend to be in the form of ethnographic studies of specific populations and sometimes of particular uses of language that are unique to those populations. For example, Heath (1983) described the narrative skills displayed by very young boys in a rural, lower SES African-American community in the southeastern United States. Boys under the age of 4 years were able to hold the floor and engage the attention of adults with the stories they told, using a variety of poetic devices, sound effects, and accompanying movement. The narrative cohesion that is part of standard assessments of children’s narrative skill is not a valued property of stories in this community. Similar skills in lowSES African-American boys have been described by VernonFeagans et al. (2001), who also described the children’s narratives as being jointly constructed with other, older children – in contrast to the narrative performances of mainstream children, which are often monologues. Research with both European-American and African-American children has described other complex skill sets that lower SES children must master including those used in teasing interchanges (Miller, 1986), in ritualized insults (Abrahams, 1962), and in the combination of improvisational rhymes, steps, and hand claps that form the ‘steps’ performances of preadolescent African-American girls (Gilmore, 1986). In addition to their description of the particular skills of particular groups, these studies make the broader point that there is substantial sociocultural variation in norms for language use that can make children from nonmainstream backgrounds look deficient when viewed from the perspective of mainstream expectations, while they are not at all deficient according to the norms for their own group. A similar argument applies to the interpretation of standardized test scores, which are frequently developed and normed using middle-class reference groups and may not tap the skills of children from other backgrounds. In the extreme, this line of reasoning argues
that any comparison of language development across socioeconomic strata is conceptually ill-founded because lower SES children are learning a different style of language use than higher SES children (see Hoff, 2013). The argument is that lower SES children have different language skills than higher SES children, but they do not have deficient language skills. It is possible, however, for there to be both stylistic differences and differences in language knowledge and skill, and the weight of the evidence argues that differences in knowledge and skill exist. Only two studies have reported SES-related differences in children’s language in the direction of lower SES children being more advanced on measures of language knowledge. Both used the MCDI, and both attributed their findings to lower SES mothers’ tendencies to overestimate their children’s abilities (Feldman et al., 2000; Fenson et al., 1994).
Sources of SES-Related Differences in Language Development The observed relations between SES and child language could be the result of several factors including (1) biologically based differences in children’s abilities, caused by genes or health; (2) global effects of differences in family functioning and home environments (Linver et al., 2002); and/or (3) specific effects of differences in language-learning experiences (Hoff and Naigles, 2002; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998). A substantial body of evidence argues for the third hypothesis that SES-related differences in children’s language skills are the result of SES-related differences in their language experience. Evidence of SES-related differences in mothers’ child-directed speech abounds. Compared to mothers with more education, mothers with less education talk less to their children, and the nature of the speech they address to children is less supportive of language development than is the speech of more educated mothers. Lower SES mothers address speech to their children more frequently for the purpose of directing their children’s behavior and less frequently for the purpose of eliciting and maintaining conversation (Hart and Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2006). In talking to their children, lower SES mothers make use of a smaller vocabulary, less complex syntactic structures, and less variety among the syntactic structures used, compared to higher SES mothers (Hoff, 2003a,b; Huttenlocher et al., 2007). Lower SES mothers have been found to spend less time in mutual activities with their children than do middle-SES mothers, and their conversations do not necessarily rely on their children’s speech (e.g., Bee et al., 1969; Farran and Haskins, 1980). Multiple studies have found that the properties characteristic of higher SES mothers are positive predictors of children’s language development – even within SES (Hoff, 2006; Huttenlocher et al., 2010). Children who experience more responsive verbal environments, who hear more speech, who hear a richer vocabulary, and who hear a greater variety of syntactic structures acquire language more rapidly than children who hear less speech and who hear speech with lower levels of these supportive features (Hoff, 2006). One study found that properties of maternal speech fully mediated an SES-related difference in 2-year-olds’ vocabulary (Hoff,
Language Development: Influence of Socio-Economic Status
2003a,b). Evidence that the relation between input and language acquisition is causal, and not just a reflection of genetically based similarity in the verbal skills of mothers and children, comes from studies of teacher input effects. Children whose teachers provide more language-advancing input progress more in their language over the course of the school year than children with teachers whose language use is less supportive (Dickinson and Porche, 2011; Huttenlocher et al., 2002). The sources of SES-related differences in language skills among older children are less directly studied. It is clear, however, that school does not eliminate the early-appearing differences. Rather, language skills at school entry predict later language and literacy skills (Dickinson et al., 2003; Muter et al., 2004; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005). SESrelated differences in children’s language skills at school entry are thought to play a large role in explaining the persistent SES-related achievement gap (Hoff, 2013).
Theoretical Implications of Relations Between SES and Language Development Each of the candidate explanations of the SES–child language relation derives from a broader scope theory of how and to what extent the environment influences development in general, and language acquisition in particular. One view is that development, in particular language development, unfolds following a genetic blueprint (e.g., Pinker, 2002). The alternative view, of course, is that the environment plays a substantial role, and the evidence that SES-related differences in children’s language development have their source in differences in their experience supports the latter view. Pointing to the environment, however, does not explain how the environment exerts its influence. It could be that the effect of the environment is global. That is, supportive environments benefit all aspects of development and unsupportive environments impede them. The fact that the effects of SES are pervasive and cross developmental domains is consistent with this global effect model. A variety of evidence argues for the principle of environmental specificity, however. According to this principle, different aspects of the environment influence different aspects of development (Wachs, 1991). For example, the aspects of maternal behavior that predict language development are different from the aspects of maternal behavior that predict play development (Lyytinen et al., 2003; Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1994). Within language, the aspects of experience that influence the development of communicative skill are different from the aspects of experience that influence the development of language knowledge (Bernicot and Roux, 1998; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Wachs and Chan, 1986). It is also likely that the input requirement for word learning and the input requirement for learning grammar differ, and that different types of words and different aspects of grammar further make their own requirements of experience. One reason that SES effects are more reliably observed in vocabulary than grammar and more for later than earlier grammatical acquisitions may have to do with the different requirements these acquisitions make and the relation of SES of each of those properties of input. For example,
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Huttenlocher et al. (2010) have argued that SES differences appear for later and not earlier grammatical development because early acquisitions depend on features of input that are always available while later acquisitions depend on features of input that vary as a function of education.
Conclusion To sum, there is ample evidence in the literature that both the environments in which children acquire language and the rate of their language development vary as a function of family SES. It has been documented extensively that mothers from different socioeconomic strata interact with and talk to their children differently, and that these factors influence the rates at which children acquire language. The weight of the evidence suggests that SES affects children’s opportunities for communicative interaction and the availability of language input with the consequence that, even after effects of language style are taken into account, the rate of children’s language development differs as a function of SES. The evidence that SES-related differences in parents’ speech cause SES-related differences in children’s language development is consistent with theoretical approaches that give experience an important role in the language acquisition process.
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Abstract Family socioeconomic status (SES) is related to language development in multiple domains, throughout childhood, and in adulthood as well. Children from lower SES homes show lower levels of language and communicative skill than children from higher SES homes beginning in infancy. The gap between lower and higher SES children persists and sometimes widens with age. Substantial evidence locates the source of these differences in children’s language experience. Children from lower SES homes are talked to less, and the speech they hear is less supportive of language development. The evidence that SESrelated differences in parents’ speech cause SES-related differences in children’s language development is consistent with theoretical approaches that give experience an important role in the language acquisition process.
The goal of this article is to summarize the evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) is related to language development and to review the literature that explains why SES has this effect. Family SES is a powerful predictor of many aspects of child development and, relatedly, of many aspects of parenting behavior (Hoff et al., 2002; Keating and Hertzman, 1999; Linver et al., 2002; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000). This article focuses on the relation of SES to children’s language development and to the antecedent SES-related differences in how parents use language in interaction with their children. The first section of this article provides a definition of SES. The second and third sections review the evidence that SES influences children’s language acquisition and does so via the influence of SES-related differences in the speech adults address to children. A final section considers the theoretical implications of the observed relations among SES, language experience, and language development.
Definitions of Socioeconomic Status SES refers to an individual’s or household’s relative position in a social hierarchy. Traditionally, this hierarchy has been defined in terms of access to, or control over, wealth, prestige, and power (Mueller and Parcel, 1981). More recently, SES has been conceptualized in terms of three sorts of capital or resources that families have access to: financial capital (material resources), human capital (nonmaterial resources, such as knowledge and skills), and social capital (connections to a larger social group) (Coleman, 1988). Researchers have measured SES using indicators of parents’ level of education, household income, and prestige of occupation, or using a composite index based on multiple indicators (Hoff et al., 2012). Each component of SES may be associated with some level of risk for poor developmental outcomes because both US and international data suggest that greater disparities and/or greater predictive power are associated with the use of multiple indicators (Fernald et al., 2011; Halle et al., 2009). Often, however, research has used maternal education as the sole index of SES on the logic that education is highly correlated with other measures, is stable,
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and appears to be the best single predictor of child outcomes (Hoff et al., 2012). Furthermore, some research indicates that outside of extreme poverty, maternal education is the component of SES most strongly related to parenting measures (Bornstein et al., 2003; Hoff et al., 2002).
Relations between SES and Language Development Throughout childhood, higher SES children have more advanced language skills than lower SES children of the same age. SES-related differences in children’s communicative behavior have been found as early as infancy, are consistently found in the preschool and school-age years, and appear in adulthood as well. For instance, Halle et al.’s (2009) study of a nationally representative sample of approximately 11 000 infants born in the United States in 2001 found SES disparities in language skills (e.g., expressive vocalization and naming objects) in infants as early as 9 months of age, and the SES-related disparities widen by 24 months of age (e.g., in receptive and expressive vocabulary and listening/ comprehension). In a public school sample, Oller and Eilers (2002) found SES-related differences in kindergarten and 5th grade children’s scores on standardized tests of oral vocabulary equal to almost one standard deviation. Among adults, Hoff-Ginsberg (1991) found that education level was related to the amount of speech, the lexical richness, and the syntactic complexity of utterances that mothers addressed to an interviewer, and Van den Broeck (1977) found education level was related to the syntactic complexity of the speech used by adults in conversation. SES-related differences in children’s language skill have been observed across multiple domains of language including vocabulary, grammar, communication, narrative skill, phonological awareness, and processing speed.
SES Differences in Vocabulary A difference in vocabulary size is the most reliably observed SES-related difference in language skill. A vocabulary gap has been found as early as the toddler years (Halle et al., 2009; Hart and Risley, 1995). The gap further widens by age 4 and then
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remains fairly stable through the school years (Farkas and Beron, 2004). The magnitude of differences related to SES can be large. Hart and Risley (1995) found that by 3 years of age, the mean cumulative recorded vocabulary for the higher SES children in that sample was over 1000 words while for the lower SES children it was close to 500; SES accounted for 36% of variance in vocabulary in this sample. Arriaga et al. (1998) found that 80% of a sample of low-SES children between 18 and 30 months scored below the 50th percentile in productive vocabulary, using a test normed on a mid- to high-SES reference group. Comparing children of collegeeducated mothers to children of high school-educated mothers, Hoff-Ginsberg (1998) found SES-related differences in the size of the vocabularies they used in spontaneous speech. SES accounted for 5% of the variance in children’s vocabulary in this sample. Other studies using spontaneous speech, maternal report measures, and standardized tests show similar findings, with the magnitude of the SES-related differences depending on the range of SES in the sample studied (Dollaghan et al., 1999; Pan et al., 2005; Rescorla, 1989). For example, SES accounted for less than 1% of the variance in vocabulary assessed via maternal report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) in a fairly homogeneous, middle-class sample (Fenson et al., 1994). Snow (1999) reported that SES differences are greater for measures of productive vocabulary than comprehension vocabulary, but Wells (1986) reported that the clearest SES-related difference is in oral comprehension. These vocabulary differences have long-term consequences. Vocabulary is a fundamental predictor of school success, and vocabulary deficits are one of the primary reasons that lower SES children enter school at greater risk for failure than their high-SES peers (Snow et al., 1998).
SES Differences in Grammar SES-related differences in grammatical development have also been found. Children from higher social strata have been found to produce longer responses to adult speech (McCarthy, 1930), score higher on standardized tests that include measures of grammatical development (Dollaghan et al., 1999), produce more complex utterances in spontaneous speech as toddlers (Arriaga et al., 1998) and at age 5 years (Snow, 1999), and perform significantly better on measures of productive and receptive syntax at age 6 years (Huttenlocher et al., 2002). As an indicator of the magnitude of these effects on grammatical development, the low-income sample studied by Snow (1999) had an average mean utterance length (MLU) at age 3;9 that would be typical of children more than a year younger according to norms based on a middle-class sample. At age 5;6, they had an average MLU typical of middle-class children aged 3;1. Arriaga et al. (1998) found that 70% of low-income children were below the 50th percentile on the MCDI measure of sentence complexity. The SES-related differences are not in whether or not children can use complex structures in their speech, but in the frequency with which they do so (Huttenlocher et al., 2002; Tough, 1982). Effects of SES on grammatical development are not as large or reliable as effects on vocabulary; some studies have found no
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relation between SES and measures of children’s syntactic development (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Hoff and Tian, 2005; Jackson and Roberts, 2001; Noble et al., 2005). A reason for these inconsistent findings is suggested by the finding in Vasilyeva et al. (2008) that SES was not related to measures of early mastery of basic syntactic rules but was related – in the same sample of children – to later differences in the use of more complex structures.
SES Differences in Communication Studies of school-aged children find SES-related differences in the communicative purposes to which language is put, such that children with less educated parents less frequently use language to analyze and reflect, to reason and justify, or to predict and consider alternative possibilities than children with more educated parents. It has been suggested that the structural differences in children’s language associated with SES may be a by-product of these functional differences (Tough, 1982). In an early sociological analysis of class and language, Bernstein (1970) similarly argued that higher and lower SES children do not differ in language knowledge but the differences in the communicative burden carried by language give rise to differences in the amount, the structure, and the lexical repertoire of the speech produced. SES-related differences in school-aged children also appear in the ability to communicate meaning through language and to draw meaning from language – sometimes referred to as speaker and listener skills (Lloyd et al., 1998). In the referential communication task, which requires children to describe one item in an array of objects so that a visually separated listener with the same array can identify that item, lower SES children are less able than higher SES children to produce sufficiently informative messages and to use information in messages addressed to them to make correct choices (Lloyd et al., 1998). Children from lower socioeconomic strata also perform less well than higher SES children in solving mathematics word problems. That some of this difference is attributable to language ability, not mathematical ability, is suggested by evidence from one sample of lower SES children who showed poorer performance than higher SES children in word problems and in tests of verbal skills but who did not differ in their performance in math calculations (Jordan et al., 1992). In sum, the findings are clear that children from different socioeconomic strata display different levels of language skill across multiple domains of language. It is also true that the specifics of SES-language relations and the size of the effects depend on the particular language outcome and the range of SES under consideration.
Other SES-Related Differences In addition to these SES-related differences in vocabulary, grammar, and communication, there are SES-related differences in children’s narrative skills, in their phonological awareness, and in their speed of language processing. The narratives produced by lower SES children are less sophisticated than the narratives produced by middle-class children of the same age, when assessed in terms of topic coherence and
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independence from the nonlinguistic context (Heath, 1983; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2001). Lower SES children show lower levels of phonological awareness than middle-class children, with the size of the SES-related difference increasing from the age of 2 to 5 years (Bowey, 1995; Lonigan et al., 1998; McDowell et al., 2007). Lower SES children are also slower in accessing the words they know (Fernald et al., 2012). In sum, a substantial body of evidence argues that the effect of SES on children’s early language skills is pervasive and robust. The size of the effect differs depending on the range of SES being considered, the age of the children, and the aspect of language under consideration, but differences as large as 1 standard deviation are frequently observed and larger differences are also possible. Using age as a measure of the size of the SES-related difference, there are findings that children from low-income backgrounds are a year or more behind their middle-class counterparts (e.g., Snow, 1999). It is important to note that neither low- nor high-SES children are monolithic in their language skill, that substantial individual differences exist within both populations, and that the distributions of skills among lower and higher SES children overlap (Hoff, 2003a,b; Pan et al., 2005). It is also important to note that low-SES children have unique linguistic strengths that are not captured by the procedures and tests most frequently used in research. Arguments for the unique skills of lower SES children tend to be in the form of ethnographic studies of specific populations and sometimes of particular uses of language that are unique to those populations. For example, Heath (1983) described the narrative skills displayed by very young boys in a rural, lower SES African-American community in the southeastern United States. Boys under the age of 4 years were able to hold the floor and engage the attention of adults with the stories they told, using a variety of poetic devices, sound effects, and accompanying movement. The narrative cohesion that is part of standard assessments of children’s narrative skill is not a valued property of stories in this community. Similar skills in lowSES African-American boys have been described by VernonFeagans et al. (2001), who also described the children’s narratives as being jointly constructed with other, older children – in contrast to the narrative performances of mainstream children, which are often monologues. Research with both European-American and African-American children has described other complex skill sets that lower SES children must master including those used in teasing interchanges (Miller, 1986), in ritualized insults (Abrahams, 1962), and in the combination of improvisational rhymes, steps, and hand claps that form the ‘steps’ performances of preadolescent African-American girls (Gilmore, 1986). In addition to their description of the particular skills of particular groups, these studies make the broader point that there is substantial sociocultural variation in norms for language use that can make children from nonmainstream backgrounds look deficient when viewed from the perspective of mainstream expectations, while they are not at all deficient according to the norms for their own group. A similar argument applies to the interpretation of standardized test scores, which are frequently developed and normed using middle-class reference groups and may not tap the skills of children from other backgrounds. In the extreme, this line of reasoning argues
that any comparison of language development across socioeconomic strata is conceptually ill-founded because lower SES children are learning a different style of language use than higher SES children (see Hoff, 2013). The argument is that lower SES children have different language skills than higher SES children, but they do not have deficient language skills. It is possible, however, for there to be both stylistic differences and differences in language knowledge and skill, and the weight of the evidence argues that differences in knowledge and skill exist. Only two studies have reported SES-related differences in children’s language in the direction of lower SES children being more advanced on measures of language knowledge. Both used the MCDI, and both attributed their findings to lower SES mothers’ tendencies to overestimate their children’s abilities (Feldman et al., 2000; Fenson et al., 1994).
Sources of SES-Related Differences in Language Development The observed relations between SES and child language could be the result of several factors including (1) biologically based differences in children’s abilities, caused by genes or health; (2) global effects of differences in family functioning and home environments (Linver et al., 2002); and/or (3) specific effects of differences in language-learning experiences (Hoff and Naigles, 2002; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998). A substantial body of evidence argues for the third hypothesis that SES-related differences in children’s language skills are the result of SES-related differences in their language experience. Evidence of SES-related differences in mothers’ child-directed speech abounds. Compared to mothers with more education, mothers with less education talk less to their children, and the nature of the speech they address to children is less supportive of language development than is the speech of more educated mothers. Lower SES mothers address speech to their children more frequently for the purpose of directing their children’s behavior and less frequently for the purpose of eliciting and maintaining conversation (Hart and Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2006). In talking to their children, lower SES mothers make use of a smaller vocabulary, less complex syntactic structures, and less variety among the syntactic structures used, compared to higher SES mothers (Hoff, 2003a,b; Huttenlocher et al., 2007). Lower SES mothers have been found to spend less time in mutual activities with their children than do middle-SES mothers, and their conversations do not necessarily rely on their children’s speech (e.g., Bee et al., 1969; Farran and Haskins, 1980). Multiple studies have found that the properties characteristic of higher SES mothers are positive predictors of children’s language development – even within SES (Hoff, 2006; Huttenlocher et al., 2010). Children who experience more responsive verbal environments, who hear more speech, who hear a richer vocabulary, and who hear a greater variety of syntactic structures acquire language more rapidly than children who hear less speech and who hear speech with lower levels of these supportive features (Hoff, 2006). One study found that properties of maternal speech fully mediated an SES-related difference in 2-year-olds’ vocabulary (Hoff,
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2003a,b). Evidence that the relation between input and language acquisition is causal, and not just a reflection of genetically based similarity in the verbal skills of mothers and children, comes from studies of teacher input effects. Children whose teachers provide more language-advancing input progress more in their language over the course of the school year than children with teachers whose language use is less supportive (Dickinson and Porche, 2011; Huttenlocher et al., 2002). The sources of SES-related differences in language skills among older children are less directly studied. It is clear, however, that school does not eliminate the early-appearing differences. Rather, language skills at school entry predict later language and literacy skills (Dickinson et al., 2003; Muter et al., 2004; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005). SESrelated differences in children’s language skills at school entry are thought to play a large role in explaining the persistent SES-related achievement gap (Hoff, 2013).
Theoretical Implications of Relations Between SES and Language Development Each of the candidate explanations of the SES–child language relation derives from a broader scope theory of how and to what extent the environment influences development in general, and language acquisition in particular. One view is that development, in particular language development, unfolds following a genetic blueprint (e.g., Pinker, 2002). The alternative view, of course, is that the environment plays a substantial role, and the evidence that SES-related differences in children’s language development have their source in differences in their experience supports the latter view. Pointing to the environment, however, does not explain how the environment exerts its influence. It could be that the effect of the environment is global. That is, supportive environments benefit all aspects of development and unsupportive environments impede them. The fact that the effects of SES are pervasive and cross developmental domains is consistent with this global effect model. A variety of evidence argues for the principle of environmental specificity, however. According to this principle, different aspects of the environment influence different aspects of development (Wachs, 1991). For example, the aspects of maternal behavior that predict language development are different from the aspects of maternal behavior that predict play development (Lyytinen et al., 2003; Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1994). Within language, the aspects of experience that influence the development of communicative skill are different from the aspects of experience that influence the development of language knowledge (Bernicot and Roux, 1998; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Wachs and Chan, 1986). It is also likely that the input requirement for word learning and the input requirement for learning grammar differ, and that different types of words and different aspects of grammar further make their own requirements of experience. One reason that SES effects are more reliably observed in vocabulary than grammar and more for later than earlier grammatical acquisitions may have to do with the different requirements these acquisitions make and the relation of SES of each of those properties of input. For example,
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Huttenlocher et al. (2010) have argued that SES differences appear for later and not earlier grammatical development because early acquisitions depend on features of input that are always available while later acquisitions depend on features of input that vary as a function of education.
Conclusion To sum, there is ample evidence in the literature that both the environments in which children acquire language and the rate of their language development vary as a function of family SES. It has been documented extensively that mothers from different socioeconomic strata interact with and talk to their children differently, and that these factors influence the rates at which children acquire language. The weight of the evidence suggests that SES affects children’s opportunities for communicative interaction and the availability of language input with the consequence that, even after effects of language style are taken into account, the rate of children’s language development differs as a function of SES. The evidence that SES-related differences in parents’ speech cause SES-related differences in children’s language development is consistent with theoretical approaches that give experience an important role in the language acquisition process.
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