Language and disadvantage: a comparison of the language abilities of adolescents from two different socioeconomic areas

Sarah Spencer · Judy Clegg · Joy Stackhouse

56 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Language & Communication Disorders

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Reading and Literacy Development Hearing Impairment and Communication

Abstract

BACKGROUND: It is recognized that children from areas associated with socioeconomic disadvantage are at an increased risk of delayed language development. However, so far research has focused mainly on young children and there has been little investigation into language development in adolescence. AIMS: To investigate the language abilities of adolescents from two different socioeconomic areas. The paper aims to determine if a higher proportion of adolescents from an area of socioeconomic disadvantage have low language scores when compared with adolescents from a relatively advantaged area. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Six standardized language assessments were used to measure expressive and receptive language skills across vocabulary, syntax and narrative in two cohorts of 13 and 14 year olds: one cohort attending a school in an area of socioeconomic disadvantage (103 participants) and the other cohort attending a school in an area of relative socioeconomic advantage (48 participants). OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The cohort from the area of disadvantage performed significantly lower than the assessments' normative mean on all measures of language ability. There were significant differences between the two cohorts on four of the six language measures. More adolescents from the school in the area of socioeconomic disadvantage had standardized assessment scores that suggest hitherto undetected language difficulties. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Results suggest that socioeconomic background is associated with language ability in adolescence as measured by standardized tests. In particular, adolescents from an area of socioeconomic disadvantage were at risk of low vocabulary scores. The advantages and disadvantages of using standardized language assessments are discussed and the implications for clinical and educational practice and for school level policies are highlighted.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

References

2014Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence 1999Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence 1998Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children 1996Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children 2004The English indices of deprivation 2004 2010Test for Reception of Grammar 2001Speech and Language Impairments in Children: Causes, Characteristics, Intervention, and Outcome 2008The Bercow Report : a review of services for children and young people (0-19) with speech, language and communication needs

Cited by

2017Development of the Survey of Parent/Provider Expectations and Knowledge (SPEAK)2017More or less likely to offend? Young adults with a history of identified developmental language disorders*2017Language impairment and comorbid vulnerabilities among young people in custody 2016Contribution of spoken language and socio-economic background to adolescents’ educational achievement at age 16 years 2019Psycholinguistic and socioemotional characteristics of young offenders: Do language abilities and gender matter?

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.