Hoff, E. & Tian, C. (2005). Socioeconomic status and cultural influences on language. Journal of Communication Disorders, 38(4), 271-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2005.02.003
This primary research article, published in a scholarly journal, concerns the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal linguistic input, and characteristics of different cultures and how these relationships affect language development in children. The research was conducted and written by Erika Hoff and Chunyan Tian. Hoff, a professor and the principal investigator of the Language Development Lab at Florida Atlantic University, who has written numerous articles about the effect of SES on language acquisition. Part one of the study - the interaction of SES, maternal speech, and language development in children in the US - is most relevant to the research question: What is the effect of socio-economic status on the rate of language acquisition in children? Hoff and Tian recruited 63 children, who were between 16 and 30 months and who had similar language development, along with their mothers, who had similar levels of education. Tian and Hoff video-recorded interactions between mother and child once and then again ten weeks later. Measures of the mothers included mean length of utterance (MLU) and the number of different types of words used; the children were measured in the number of different word types expressed in 90 utterances. This part of the study concluded that mothers of a higher SES had more varied word-type and also used more words when compared to mothers of lower SES. This large, varied vocabulary had a strong, positive effect on the development vocabulary of the child.
Hoff's article provides a strong foundation when attempting to determine the effect of SES on language development in children. In this article, Hoff and Tian refer to studies that have been previously conducted to find the following conclusions: children of lower SES regularly have slower rates of language development, mothers of lower SES typically use a smaller vocabulary, speak fewer words, and ask fewer open-ended questions of their children, and maternal speech affects the language development in the child. This article ties all of these studies together to come to the following conclusion: differences in lexical development in children may be a reflection of quality and quantity of maternal input (which, in turn, is influenced by familial SES), rather than impairment. This directly addresses the topic in question for my research.
