Poverty-Related Risk Factors for Auditory and Language Deficits in Children

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Project Summary/Abstract Ever since Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in the 1960s, developmental scientists have been assessing the effects of poverty on child development, especially language acquisition. Ample evidence shows that some of the negative effect can be explained by social determinants: how parents talk to their children, parental stress, and parents’ knowledge of child development. But these factors fail to account for all, or even most of the language deficit seen in children of poverty. The goal of this project is to explore the hypothesis that poverty-driven biological determinants can explain previously unaccounted for variance in those deficits. Two novel mechanisms are proposed to account for additional variance in the language deficits of children of poverty: (1) Mothers and children in poverty face healthcare inequities that put these children at enhanced risk of delays in the development of auditory functions, beyond raised thresholds; (2) Deficits in suprathreshold auditory functions negatively impact language acquisition for children in poverty more than for children from middle-class backgrounds because optimal social factors buffer effects for the latter group. With these possibilities in mind, the overall goal of this current project is to explore the comprehensive hypothesis that being born into poverty imposes myriad risk factors for delayed development of language skills, arising from both social and biological determinants. The social determinants to be studied include: (1) impoverished parental language input; (2) enhanced parental stress; and (3) poorer parental knowledge of child development. The biological determinants include: (1) premature birth and (2) chronic otitis media with effusion (OME). The most innovative aspect of this work is that it will explore the hypothesis that prematurity and OME are responsible for delays in development of suprathreshold auditory processes critical to language acquisition. Children born into poverty are both more likely to experience these health problems and less likely to benefit from the mitigating effects of a highly supportive environment. This project seeks: (1) to measure the contributions of each of these sources of deficit by examining auditory (spectral and temporal processing) and language (lexical, morphosyntactic, and phonological) functioning in young children born with varying SES; (2) to expand our understanding of the connections from perinatal/postnatal health conditions to development of auditory functions to language learning; and (3) disentangle the effects of poverty and systemic racism on these barriers to language acquisition. These goals will be addressed with three Specific Aims. Aim #1 will quantify the direct effects of the social and biological determinants described above on language skills. Aims #2 and #3 will focus on the proposed biological determinants, assessing the effects of premature birth and OME on the emergence of spectral and temporal processing (Aim #2) and assessing the contributions of spectral and temporal processing to language acquisition across the socioeconomic continuum (Aim #3). Results will enhance our understanding of the root sources of language deficit for children in poverty, as well as for all children born too soon or experiencing OME.