Social Disadvantage and Language Disorder: Is Dissociating Possible?

Area of Science:

• Child Development
• Linguistics
• Sociology

Background:

• Socioeconomic status (SES) significantly impacts child development, including language acquisition.
• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects a substantial number of children, with potential links to environmental factors.
• Understanding the interplay between SES and DLD is crucial for early identification and intervention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the risk of DLD in children from lower SES backgrounds compared to higher SES.
• To identify specific language skills most affected by SES.
• To determine the most effective measures for differentiating DLD in low-SES children.

Main Methods:

• Comparison of Russian-speaking children from middle (urban) and low (rural) SES groups.
• Utilized standardized language tasks and narrative microstructure indices.
• Compared low-SES children from high-DLD prevalence and average-DLD prevalence rural populations.

Main Results:

• Rural children underperformed urban children across all language assessments.
• Sentence repetition showed the largest SES effect and smallest DLD effect.
• Following multi-step directions differentiated high-risk from average-risk rural groups, showing a modest SES but large DLD effect.

Conclusions:

• Rural poverty significantly affects both expressive and receptive language skills in children.
• Expressive syntax, especially with high working memory demands, is vulnerable to social disadvantage.
• Receptive tasks involving multi-step directions may be a useful diagnostic marker for DLD in low-SES children.