Theory Ample data has demonstrated a correlation between SES and children’s language development

1. Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Key insight SES Vocabulary growth Theory • Ample data has demonstrated a correlation between SES and children’s language development • This study tested the hypothesis that SES-related differences in the development of children’s productive vocabulary can be explained by SES-related differences in their language-learning experiences (i.e., they are trying to show cause) Methods • 33 high-SES and 30 mid-SES monolingual English mom-child dyad; children matched for vocabularies at time 1 • Pre-measures of maternal speech • Pre-and post-measures of children’s vocabulary SES-related properties of maternal speech Strengths • Explains relationship between SES and children’s language development • Controlled for birth order • Weaknesses • Only looked at high- and mid-SES families; other factors may be at work in low-SES families • Only 1 observation to assess maternal speech & only 2 observations to assess children’s vocabs • Possible age confound; children were matched on vocab skills, not age, which ranged from 16-31 mos Findings • SES significantly related to children’s vocab growth • SES significantly related to maternal speech (# word tokens, # word types, mean length utterances) • SES-related maternal speech properties significantly related to children’s vocabulary growth • After variance attributable to birth order and child vocab at Time 1 was removed, properties of maternal speech accounted for 22% of variance in child outcome, leaving only a nonsignificant 1% of variance in child vocab growth attributable to SES • Thus, maternal speech properties mediate relationship between SES and children’s vocab development