Informing Interventions: improving the measurement of children's vocabulary knowledge and caregiver input in the Deep South

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The current project seeks to improve how researchers measure and characterize the type of language input children throughout the Deep South hear in their day-to-day lives. The project will also characterize how variability in this input contributes to children’s vocabulary knowledge. There are well-established associations between caregiver linguistic input and children’s vocabulary development, resulting in extensive intervention efforts focused on modifying the home language environment. To date, most research on this topic has been conducted in urban cities in the northeast and midwest United States; however, the language children hear and speak in the Deep South varies based on differences in culture and dialect. By understanding the sources of variability underlying vocabulary differences among low socioeconomic status (SES) children in the Deep South, this project can inform existing interventions which seek to close academic achievement gaps. It is also critical that assessments are sensitive to community-based and dialect-based differences. Children in rural, low SES communities, and children who speak nonmainstream dialects, such as African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE), are frequently classified as language delayed or disordered when really, they are language different. The current proposal seeks to reduce these misclassifications by a) identifying which standardized assessments most accurately measure children’s vocabulary knowledge (static versus dynamic), b) characterizing variability in the type of language caregivers in the Deep South provide to their children, and c) determining which aspects of the language input children hear are most likely to promote vocabulary learning. Determining the best approaches to measuring vocabulary in this population and considering how differences in language input contributes to vocabulary variability will reduce disproportionate discrimination against the characterization of their language abilities.This project is jointly funded by the Developmental Sciences Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.