Abstract
This study aimed to explore quantitative and qualitative effects of type of school and specific language impairment (SLI) on different language abilities. 204 Brazilian children aged from 4 to 6 years old participated in the study. Children were selected to form three groups: 1) 63 typically developing children studying in private schools (TDPri); 2) 102 typically developing children studying in state schools (TDSta); and 39 children with SLI studying in state schools (SLISta). All individuals were assessed regarding expressive vocabulary, number morphology and morphosyntactic comprehension. All language subsystems were vulnerable to both environmental (type of school) and biological (SLI) effects. The relationship between the three language measures was exactly the same to all groups: vocabulary growth correlated with age and with the development of morphological abilities and morphosyntactic comprehension. Children with SLI showed atypical errors in the comprehension test at the age of 4, but presented a pattern of errors that gradually resembled typical development. The effect of type of school was marked by quantitative differences, while the effect of SLI was characterised by both quantitative and qualitative differences.
Highlights
Language development depends both on environmental and genetic factors[1]
Children were recruited to form three groups: 1) 63 typically developing children studying in private schools (TDPri); 2) 102 typically developing children studying in state schools (TDSta); and 39 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) studying in state schools (SLISta)
Posthoc analysis (Bonferroni) indicated the pattern of responses was similar to all tests: children from the SLISta group performed worse than TDSta children (p
Summary
Language development depends both on environmental and genetic factors[1]. Some of the language domains are largely influenced by the quantity and quality of stimuli children are exposed to[2], whilst others rely more on the genetic characteristics of the individuals[3,4]. Environmental and genetic factors play different roles, language development is mainly influenced by the interaction between the two[5,6]. Hart and Risley were the first to identify that the language used by parents coming from high SES was quantitatively and qualitatively more complex than the one used by low-SES parents. Those differences were directly related to the vocabulary used by children. At the age of 3, children from high SES used approximately 12 million words whereas low-SES children used only 3 million[7]
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