From infancy to fifth grade--what factors affect vocabulary development in low-income children?

In an article posted this month in Cognitive Development, authors Ober and Brooks tried to identify what contributes to a child’s developmental “resilience in the face of adversity, and whether the associations differ for Black/African American and White/European American children from low-income backgrounds.” In this article, their focus was on children’s vocabulary development. Ober and Brooks used structural equation modeling to tease apart the direct and indirect influences on such development, utilizing public-use data containing contextual (home environment), maternal (educational attainment, maternal distress), interactional (joint attention, negative interaction), and child (gestational age, gender) measures gathered at 14 months, 36 months, Pre-K, and fifth grade from children in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation (EHSRE) Study, 1996-2010: [United States] (ICPSR 3804). Distributed by the Child and Family Data Archive, the EHSRE Study involved 3,001 children and families in 17 Early Head Start sites, with data collection in multiple phases using multiple measures. Ober and Brooks made use of a subset of data gathered from children who were in the EHSRE Study’s control group (i.e., not enrolled in Early Head Start programs). Among their findings: “even after accounting for the influence of developmental factors of the child, parent, and home environment, mother-infant joint engagement had robust associations with the child’s subsequent receptive vocabulary development through Grade 5.” They also found that these associations “were stable across Black/African American and White/European American subgroups that differed in socioeconomic risk, despite all families being of low income.” According to the authors, their findings also indicate “how the positive impact of supportive parent-child interactions and home environments during infancy persist over time, and partially mediate indirect influences of maternal distress and maternal education on vocabulary growth.” More publications making use of the EHSRE Study data can be found here.