Susan Goldin-Meadow, Susan Levine: Home Language Influences on High School Readiness

Our goal is to better understand the social inequalities in achievement that begin before the start of school and that persist throughout schooling and into employment. We do so by examining two early childhood factors that place youth at risk for inequalities in higher order thinking skills, an important component of many workplace tasks in the 21st century: (1) children at risk because they received inadequate linguistic stimulation prior to school entry (environmental risk); (2) children at risk because they suffered brain injury around birth (organic risk). We propose to collect and analyze new outcome data during high school, a key time when individual differences begin to carry important life consequences, for two samples of youth whom we have been observing for 15 years: 60 typically developing children selected to represent the demographics of Chicago; 40 children who suffered pre-orperinatal brain lesions. We have videotaped everyday parent-child talk at regular intervals in both samples from 14 mos.–10 yrs. to better understand how early home environments can lead to later differences in achievement. The uniqueness of our project is that we will be able to consider the relation of parent-child patterns established early in development to data to-be-collected on high school performance. We can therefore use our detailed long-term data to probe predictive relationships that can be causally tested in intervention studies. To do so, we plan to use cutting-edge statistical methodologies developed for this project to pinpoint time periods that may be particularly efficient leverage points for interventions.

Susan Goldin-Meadow
University of Chicago, Department of Psychology

Susan Levine
University of Chicago, Department of Psychology