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Part of
Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Edited by Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-Roig
[Not in series 223] 2019
► pp. 93–112

The influence of maternal education on the linguistic abilities of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with and without Specific Language Impairment

 | Hospital General Dr. Manuel Gea González | Instituto Mexicano para la Atención del Desarrollo del Niño (IMAD, A.C.)
 | Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
 | Instituto Nacional de Pediatría
Many Spanish-speaking children from low socioeconomic status grow in families with low maternal education (ME), which may reflect differences in quality and quantity of children’s input. Lexical and grammatical abilities from these children are frequently confused with those of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The aim of this research was to compare lexical and grammatical abilities in 400 monolingual children with and without SLI (aged 4;0 to 6;11) classified in ME groups. Analyses of variance revealed differences between ME groups. Regression analyses revealed that ME and age contributed to the greatest amount of variance in lexical but not grammatical abilities. The discussion is centered on the importance of considering ME as a distal factor that affects linguistic abilities.
Keywords: maternal education, grammatical measures, lexical measures, specific language impairment
Article outline
  • Overview
    • Family and socioeconomic status
    • Family and language development
    • Risk factors associated to language difficulties
    • Goals
  • Methodology
    • Participants
    • Selection criteria
    • Instruments
    • Experimental task
    • Procedure
    • Analysis
  • Results
    • Interaction between clinical diagnosis of SLI and ME level
  • Discussion
  • Limitations
  • Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 11 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.223.06ale
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