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Dissociating Socioeconomic Influences On Maternal Language Input And Child Language Outcomes, Klaudia Kulawska

Honors Theses

Early language development is associated with children’s socioeconomic status (SES). Specifically, children from lower SES backgrounds, on average, exhibit slower language development compared to their peers from higher-SES backgrounds. Even though SES is a multidimensional construct, research often relies on a single dimension or a composite measure when studying child language development. In this article, I investigate four dimensions of SES, including maternal education, income-to-needs ratio, financial security, and neighborhood SES. Specifically, I examine whether the quantity and quality of maternal linguistic input mediates the relationships between dimensions of SES and child receptive language skills. Mothers and their 36-40 months …