Erika Hoff - US grants

It is widely acknowledged that early child development is sensitive to the social environment in which it occurs, although the details of the relationship between the environment and child development are not well understood. The proposed research is a short-term longitudinal study of the influence of the social environment on early mother-child conversation and the effects of that early language experience on children's language development. The participants will be 30 working-class and 30 upper-middle-class mothers and their 16-22 month-old children. Interaction will be recorded in the home in four different naturalistic settings -- dressing, feeding, bookreading, and play. Video-taped records of mother-child interaction will be collected twice over a two-month period of language growth which includes the beginning of combinatorial speech. Properties of mother and child speech coded from transcripts of these interactions will provide the data for two proposed studies. Study 1 investigates whether mothers' speech to their children varies as a function of setting or social class and whether such variation is relevant to children's language growth. Study 2 investigates whether different environments support language development in different ways by comparing the influences of mothers' speech on their children's language growth in the two social classes. The objective of this research is to describe the range of linguistic interactions children experience in different social environments and the influences of those environments on language development. That description should provide a basis for evaluating competing hypotheses concerning how the child's learning mechanisms use the experiences provided by the child's social environment in acquiring language. This research should also provide a basis for optimizing the environmental supports for language acquisition in cases of language delay.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Early oral language development provides the foundation for later school achievement and literacy. In some children that foundation is weak, placing them at risk. This is particulary the case for bilingual children, who are overrepresented among children whose early oral language skills compromise their opportunties for later academic success. Understanding influences on monolingual and bilingual development is, therefore, a public health concern. The broad aim of the proposed research is to address this concern by increasing scientific understanding of the external causes and internal processes that produce individual differences in the early language development of monolingual and bilingual children. The proposed research will test the hypothesis that language input influences the development of phonological memory, which, in turn, influences language development. Although relations between phonological memory and language development are well established, very little work has investigated influences on the development of phonological memory itself. Furthermore, research on phonological memory is largely confined to monolingual children over the age of 4 years. These gaps may be due, in part, to a lack of assessment instruments. In preliminary work, the PIs have developed a procedure for assessing phonological memory in children younger than 2 years. The specific aims of the proposed research are: (1) to establish the reliability and validity of this assessment procedure, including extending it to Spanish- English bilingual children, and (2) to use this procedure in order to investigate the relations among language input, phonological memory, and early monolingual and bilingual development. One short-term longitudinal study is proposed. For 50 monolingual English-learning children and 50 Spanish- and English-learning bilingual children, language input, phonological memory, and language development will be assessed at 22 months and language development will be assessed again at 25 months of age. Concurrent and predictive relations among these variables will be tested. The outcomes of this project will advance our understanding of the role of language input and phonological working memory in early monolingual and bilingual language development and will provide the first steps toward the development of tools to identify bilingual children at risk for later language disorders. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children from bilingual homes are a large and growing segment of the population. Their early language competencies are neither well described nor understood. Because language skills during the preschool years are predictive of later academic achievement and social adjustment, the current poor understanding of early bilingual development constitutes a significant public health problem. Aim 1 of the proposed research is to identify the environmental factors associated with successful bilingual development in children exposed to two languages from infancy. The language skills and language environments of 2 1/2 -year-old Spanish-English bilingual children will be assessed, and the relation of their language skills to their language environments investigated. The proposed research will be the first to describe young bilingual children's language competencies in terms of their phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic development in both languages, assessed with standardized instruments and with measures based on spontaneous speech samples. The proposed research will be the first to describe bilingual environments using caregiver interviews, caregiver-kept diaries of their children's language experience, and samples of caregivers'child-directed speech in both languages. The approaches to describing children's language competencies and language environments will make use of variable-centered and person-centered data analytic techniques, yielding descriptions in terms of continuous dimensions of variability and in terms of frequently-occurring types, or categories. Analyses of the relations between skills and environments will be conducted using both kinds of descriptors. Aim 2 of the proposed research is to test theory-driven hypotheses regarding mechanisms of language development against the evidence of within- and across-language interrelations among components of language skill in bilingual children. Bilingual children may show patterns of development in which phonological and morphosyntactic development are more advanced than lexical development and in which receptive competence is more advanced than productive competence, relative to monolingual norms. In such bilingual children, the interrelations among skills across domains should differ from those typically observed, and the specifics of those interrcorrelations should constrain hypotheses regarding the mechanisms of language acquisition and suggest ways in which growing knowledge of two languages does or does not interact in the process of bilingual development. The proposed research will fill a gap in the knowledge base needed to provide quality educational and clinical services to a substantial segment of the nation's children and will advance scientific understanding of the process of early bilingual development. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The current lack of information about the language skills of children growing up in bilingual homes is an obstacle to maximizing the economic potential of a substantial segment of the nation's children. The aims of the proposed research are to describe the patterns of bilingual competencies that children display and to identify environmental correlates of successful bilingualism at an early, critical juncture in children's development.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed research is to identify factors associated with positive language, literacy, and academic outcomes in children from Spanish-speaking homes and, thereby, to provide a scientific basis for public policy and educational practices aimed at supporting the development and achievement of language minority children. One in 5 children in the U.S. live in homes where a language other than English is spoken; among school-aged children, 79% of these homes are Spanish-speaking. Many children in this population reach school age with low levels of English language skills, and they do not catch up to the skill level required for success in school in time to avoid serious academic disadvantage. Low levels of literacy and academic achievement are associated with higher rates of disease, mental illness, unemployment, and contact with the criminal justice system, making literacy and academic achievement among this large and growing segment of the population a national health concern. The proposed research is a continuation of a longitudinal study of children from Spanish-speaking homes and children from monolingual English- speaking homes that began when the children were 2 1/2 years old and has followed them, thus far, to the age of 5 years and the point of school entry. The new work will assess the children's language environments, dual language and literacy development, and executive function skill growth from age 6 to 10. Scores on school-administered assessments of academic achievement are additional outcomes measured in the 3rd and 4th grade. The specific aims are (1) to describe language and literacy trajectories in English and Spanish across the transition to school and to assess the relation of early dual language experience, early dual language development, and concurrent home and school influences to individual differences in those trajectories, (2) to test the hypotheses that strong Spanish skills and strong executive function skills are protective factors in children from language minority homes that mitigate the risk for poor literacy and academic achievement associated with low English skills at school entry, and (3) to test the hypothesis that children with low English and low Spanish skills are particularly a risk and to identify antecedents of low risk and high risk skill profiles. The results of the proposed research will allow identification of language minority children most at risk for low levels of English literacy and academic achievement and will identify targets for interventions aimed at enhancing literacy and related health and academic outcomes in children from language minority homes. The proposed analyses will not exhaust the usefulness of the database that will result from this work. That database will include detailed measures of dual language environments and dual language skill growth from the age of 2 1/2 to 10 years, with measures of executive control, literacy, and academic achievement during elementary school, for 130 children from Spanish-speaking families and 30 children from monolingual English-speaking families. No other such database exists in the U.S.