Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between parents’ and children's language skills for a nationally representative birth cohort born in the United Kingdom—the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). We investigate both socioeconomic and ethnic differentials in children's vocabulary scores and the role of differences in parents’ vocabulary scores in accounting for these. We find large vocabulary gaps between highly educated and less educated parents, and between ethnic groups. Nevertheless, socioeconomic and ethnic gaps in vocabulary scores are far wider among the parents than among their children. Parental vocabulary is a powerful mediator of inequalities in offspring's vocabulary scores at age 14, and also a powerful driver of change in language skills between the ages of five and 14. Once we account for parental vocabulary, no ethnic minority group of young people has a negative “vocabulary gap” compared to whites.
Highlights
Social class differences in language use have been central to some of the major sociological theories regarding the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage
Notable coefficients are as follows: a one standard deviation increase in verbal cognition at age five is associated with a 0.5 word increase in mean vocabulary scores; a one standard deviation increase in maternal vocabulary is associated with an advantage of 0.4 words; a one standard deviation increase in partner's vocabulary equates to 0.3 words; more than 500 books in the home equates to 0.7 words; Bangladeshi ethnicity equates to 0.7 words; a non-English language at home equates to 0.6 words, and reading for pleasure most days at age 11 equates to 0.8 words
Our central result is that parental vocabulary scores mediate a substantial share of the socioeconomic gradient in children's vocabulary at age 14
Summary
|2 measures of linguistic attainment have rarely been used in empirical operationalizations of Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction (Sullivan, 2001). Most empirical studies have neglected the role of parental language skills This means we do not know to what extent parental language skills are transmitted to the child, or how important parental language skills are in explaining socioeconomic gaps in children's language skills. Hart and Risley's research on 42 families in one U.S college town found strong social class and black-white differences in the range of vocabulary used by parents when talking to their children. Their headline finding that “professional class” children had been exposed to 30 million more words than “welfare children” had by age three (Hart & Risley, 2003) has been enormously influential, despite the drawback of a small and unrepresentative sample. Given that language scores on school entry are a strong predictor of later language acquisition (Duncan et al, 2007), we assess whether parental vocabulary is associated with a growing language gap for children between the ages of five and 14
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