The role of socioeconomic and sociocultural predictors of Spanish and English proficiencies of young Latino children of immigrants.
Brian A Collins, Claudio O Toppelberg
PMID 32460933WHAT IT FOUND
Socioeconomic factors like poverty and parental education predicted English proficiency, while sociocultural factors like home language use and parent origin predicted Spanish proficiency.
Maintaining Spanish at home or in preschool did not harm English development.
Key findings
01Poverty and parental education were associated with English proficiency but not Spanish, whereas parent origin and home language use were associated with Spanish but not English.
02Children whose mothers spoke mostly or only Spanish to them had higher Spanish proficiency at kindergarten and second grade, with no significant differences in English proficiency across families who spoke more or less English.
03Attending early childhood settings where Spanish was used significantly predicted higher Spanish proficiency but was not associated with lower English proficiency.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is observational, so it cannot prove that specific interventions cause language changes. Attrition was 20% by second grade, though missing data was analyzed as random. Standardized tests used monolingual norms, which typically result in below-average scores for dual language children, potentially misrepresenting their true proficiency. The sample was limited to Latino children in the Northeast U.S., mostly of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, so findings may not generalize to other immigrant groups or regions. Home language use was reported by parents rather than directly observed, which may introduce recall bias.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. No other conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the low standardized scores in both languages as evidence of a language disorder. The study notes that below-average performance on these measures is typical for dual language children due to the use of monolingual norms.