Abstract
Child sex and family socioeconomic status (SES) have been repeatedly identified as a source of inter-individual variation in language development; yet their interactions have rarely been explored. While sex differences are the focus of a renewed interest concerning emerging language skills, data remain scarce and are not consistent across preschool years. The questions of whether family SES impacts boys and girls equally, as well as of the consistency of these differences throughout early childhood, remain open. We evaluated consistency of sex differences across SES and age by focusing on how children (N = 262), from 2;6 to 6;4 years old, from two contrasting social backgrounds, acquire a frequent phonological alternation in French – the liaison. By using a picture naming task eliciting the production of obligatory liaisons, we found evidence of sex differences over the preschool years in low-SES children, but not between high-SES boys and girls whose performances were very similar. Low-SES boys’ performances were the poorest whereas low-SES girls’ performances were intermediate, that is, lower than those of high-SES children of both sexes but higher than those of low-SES boys. Although all children’s mastery of obligatory liaisons progressed with age, our findings showed a significant impeding effect of low-SES, especially for boys.
Highlights
Language is one of mankind’s key abilities and a universal feature of human development; primary emphasis has often been placed on documenting universal processes of language acquisition by focusing on children’s achievement of milestones, relegating interindividual variation to the background
The Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) yielded a main effect of Age: the productions of correct liaisons by all the children improved significantly with age
To illustrate this notable mastery of obligatory liaisons across the preschool years, the coefficient associated with Age indicates that the log-odds of a correct liaison for 5–6 year-olds were 3.25 log-odds higher than for children in the youngest age group, namely that the odds of a correct liaison for 5–6 year-olds were 25.8 (i.e., e3.25) times higher than the odds for 2–3 year-olds
Summary
Language is one of mankind’s key abilities and a universal feature of human development; primary emphasis has often been placed on documenting universal processes of language acquisition by focusing on children’s achievement of milestones, relegating interindividual variation to the background. While family SES and child sex have both been the focus of a great deal of research, less attention has been directed toward understanding how these factors interact across ages in order to account for between-child differences in language development This knowledge is important in order to go beyond the current debate on the mere existence of sex-related differences in language and to improve our understanding of the detrimental effect of lower-SES in relation to child sex. In this perspective, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether sex differences are consistent across socioeconomic subgroups and whether family SES impacts children of both sexes by comparing children’s language skills at the two extremities of the socioeconomic strata across a wide age range covering the preschool years
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