Children's experience, understanding, and use of adjectives across the socioeconomic spectrum.

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Children need a solid command of adjectives and other forms of descriptive language (e.g. adverbs) to communicate successfully. At school, adjectives are explicitly taught as a way for children to develop their narrative abilities and language complexity. Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating. They can increase vocabulary, which is highly predictive of children's subsequent achievement, i.e. children who arrive at school with good language skills have better chances at school, better chances of entering higher education, and better economic skills in adulthood (Blanden, 2006). However, children are unable to use adjectives flexibly until around four years of age, a late stage compared to the acquisition of other open word classes. Despite their clear importance and relatively late appearance, adjectives have received little attention by researchers. Crucially, adjectives may present particular challenges to children with or at risk of language delay (Ricks & Alt, 2016), yet speech and language therapy has not typically focused on this aspect of language. This project will transform our understanding of how young children experience adjectives and how they use that input in their own developing speech. By examining children's psycholinguistic processing within its social context, we will reveal how socioeconomic background affects developmental mechanisms, integrating research strands previously kept separate. An integrated approach is vital for fully understanding the challenges children face when acquiring adjectives. Our findings will enable us to identify the very best ways of boosting children's language at home and at school, across the socioeconomic spectrum. In a series of experiments, I will survey the descriptive language that children hear, measure 3-year-olds' comprehension of a range of adjectives using state of the art eyetracking methods, develop an innovative method which enables laboratory-grade measurement of children's language processing in response to their caregivers' naturalistic speech, and evaluate the effectiveness of a randomised controlled family-based language intervention. With community groups, practitioners, and national organisations, I will use the findings to co-produce accessible materials for promoting language in children from a range of backgrounds. Children's language experience and skills vary widely as a function of their socioeconomic background. Children from the lowest UK income quintile can be up to 19 months behind their more affluent peers in vocabulary development on school entry (Sutton Trust, 2012), and the increased risk of early language problems for children growing up in socioeconomically disadvantaged families has been well documented. Although the impact of socioeconomic factors on other aspects of language development is clear, their effect on adjective acquisition has not yet been explored. Some of the challenges posed by adjectives may be disproportionate for children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, whose word learning and sentence comprehension difficulties are more likely to hinder their ability to handle descriptive language. More positively, research suggests that the language that caregivers use with their children can help: the more adjectives they use, and the more explicitly they use them in sentences, the more effective their children's use of adjectives will be. Findings will have important theoretical and methodological implications for research in language development. They will also have significant societal impact. With an expert advisory board, I will use my research findings to co-produce targeted recommendations to families, practitioners, and policymakers working with children facing challenges with descriptive language. The project also offers numerous opportunities for my development as a leading international researcher in language acquisition, and for the project team in their career development.