SES differences in early linguistic experiences and outcomes (organizadora)

ALAM FLORENCIA

Lyon

Congreso; International Association for the study of Child Language; 2017

Current theories of early language acquisition hold that language development results from the interplay between children´s cognitive biases and strategies, and the linguistic experiences available to the young child. Work on the mechanisms involved in early language acquisition relies crucially on careful documentation of the extent of variation in the quantity and quality of linguistic input available to individual children from different socio-economic backgrounds, and their effects on the children´s own language development. In this symposium we will present studies on SES differences in early linguistic experiences of Spanish- and English-speaking children from four countries. All the studies consider longitudinal variations and relate linguistic input to children´s language development. The first speaker analyses whether exposure to adult speech mediates relations between SES and language outcomes in a Mexican population. The second documents SES differences in input in a very diverse Argentinean sample and considers their impact on vocabulary comprehension assessed with a touch-screen test, specially designed to prevent cultural bias affecting the children?s performance. The third presents a study in Great Britain where parents from low and high SES were encouraged to produce contingent talk. Effects of the intervention were obvious short-term, whereas in the long term language production was better predicted by a combination of baseline infant communicative ability, baseline parental speech and socio-economic status. The forth speaker describes an intervention in the US targeting parental gestures, and measuring potential effects on both parent and child?s gestures in the home. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive insight of language acquisition in socio-economically diverse samples, and on which aspects of early experiences may have a lasting impact on the child. We also expect this symposium to stimulate novel ideas for interventions that improve children´s language development trajectories.