Maternal Education Revisited: Vocabulary Growth before 30 months of Age in Spanish- and English-dominant children

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Background: Socioeconomic status (SES) and maternal education are positively associated with early vocabulary size in English (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2008). However, the relation between maternal education and early vocabulary size is less clear in Spanish (e.g., Friend et al., 2017; Hurtado et al, 2008). In the United States, Spanish is the most frequent minority language spoken in the home. Of the 21.3% of the population who speak a language other than English, 13.2% speak Spanish (i.e., ~40 million Spanish speakers; US Census 2017, Language Spoken At Home). Hoff et al. (2017) propose that language of maternal education is specific in its influence: Spanish vocabulary is related to mothers’ highest level of education in Spanish by 30 months of age. We assess maternal education and vocabulary growth in Spanish- and English-dominant children earlier, at 16, 22, and 30 months of age, to clarify the timing of maternal education effects. We evaluate two hypotheses:
1) The specificity hypothesis: Language-specific maternal education effects emerge at the same time across languages.
2) The timing hypothesis: Maternal education effects emerge later in Spanish- than in English-speaking children.
Method: Participants were 61 English- and 53 Spanish-dominant children and their mothers. Parents completed the LEAT language exposure questionnaire (DeAnda, et al., 2016), the MCDI (Fenson et al. 2005) (or IDHC, Maldonado et al., 2003), and reported the language and highest level of maternal education. We constructed a set of models to assess vocabulary growth across three time points from 16 to 30 months of age. Following Hoff et al. (2017), growth curve models were constructed separately for English and Spanish vocabulary. We began with an intercept only model to determine whether sufficient variability existed among participants to justify a more complex model. We next constructed models with only child age as a predictor then added the LEAT assessment of relative language exposure and mothers’ level of education to ask whether model fit improved.
Results: Maternal education in English predicted English vocabulary at 22 months, as well as growth in vocabulary from 22 to 30 months. However, trajectories of vocabulary growth as a function of maternal education in Spanish did not diverge until 30 months of age.
Conclusion: The present research reconciles previous accounts of the effects of maternal education on vocabulary in Spanish-dominant children suggesting that both accounts are partially correct. Vocabulary in English-dominant children varied significantly as a function of maternal education beginning at 22 months of age. There was also a marginal effect of maternal education in Spanish on vocabulary in Spanish-dominant children but this effect did not emerge until 30 months of age. Consistent with the timing hypothesis, maternal education effects on early vocabulary emerge later for Spanish-dominant than for English-dominant children.

Authors

• Margaret J. Friend, San Diego State University
  Presenting Author

• Oliver Lopez
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stephanie De Anda, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Natalia Arias-Trejo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roberto Abreu-Mendoza, Rutgers University - Newark
  Non-Presenting Author