Social Disadvantage and Language Disorder: Is Dissociating Possible?
Natalia Rakhlin, Nan Li, Darya Momotenko, Anastasia Sukmanova, Elizaveta Ivanova, Alisa Kosikova, Elena L. GrigorenkoPurpose:
We (a) investigated whether children of lower socioeconomic status (SES) are at a greater risk of developmental language disorder (DLD) than children of higher SES, based on standardized assessment; (b) identified the language skills most strongly affected by SES; and (c) examined which standardized and naturalistic measures best differentiate DLD in children from lower SES backgrounds.
Method:
We compared Russian-speaking children of middle SES (urban) and low SES (rural) on standardized language tasks. To disentangle SES effects from heritable risk for DLD, we further compared low-SES children from two rural populations—one with a high prevalence of DLD and one with an average level of DLD—using standardized language tasks and indices of narrative microstructure.
Results:
Rural children performed more poorly than urban children across all assessments, whereas the two rural samples differed only minimally on most subtests. Sentence repetition showed the largest SES effect and the smallest DLD effect. In contrast, the only standardized subtest that differentiated the high-risk from average-risk rural group involved following multistep directions, which exhibited a modest SES but a large DLD effect. Most indices of narrative microstructure did not reliably distinguish children at a high risk for DLD from those at an average risk within the rural sample.
Conclusions:
Our results suggest that rural poverty exerts a pronounced effect on multiple aspects of both expressive and receptive language. Although test bias may account for some of these differences, it is unlikely to explain the large disparity between rural and urban children, particularly on sentence repetition. This pattern indicates that expressive syntax—particularly in tasks with high working memory demands—is especially vulnerable to the effects of social disadvantage, in a manner functionally similar to DLD. In contrast, receptive tasks that require children to follow multipart directions appear to be a relative strength for children from lower SES backgrounds and may serve as a useful diagnostic marker for differentiating heritable DLD in this group of children.
Supplemental Material: