Family Determinants to Children’s Language Development: A Longitudinal Study in Rural China

• In Event: What Matters in Language Development

Abstract

Worker migration is a phenomenon that leaves children at home while their parents move to different areas for work. Previous research shows that being left-behind is associated with negative academic outcomes. However, these studies evaluated the left-behind phenomenon utilizing cross-sectional data and only targeted adolescents. This longitudinal study seeks to describe growth trajectories in language development between left-behind and non-left-behind children, specifically among young children living in poverty-stricken areas of rural China. We analyzed longitudinal data collected from 120 preschool students from village-level kindergartens in China. Surprisingly, results from individual growth models show that receptive and expressive vocabulary growth rates do not differ between left-behind and non-left-behind children, after controlling for child and family demographic characteristics.

Authors

• Hang Heather Do, University of Pennsylvania

• Si Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Kenny Nguyen, Harvard University