Impacts of socioeconomic status and language input

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 19:00:00 -0500

A new research theme has emerged, examining the impacts of socioeconomic status and language input variability on the learning and comprehension of sentences. This brings together faculty and students from 3 departments in 3 colleges, and it was the result of a co-taught IGERT seminar in 2012 that bridged two very different approaches to the study of language development, emerging from the fields of education and cognitive science. Katie Leech (Education) used eye-tracking measures to investigate the comprehension of passive sentences in children of higher and lower SES, as part of her lab rotation with Yi Ting Huang (Hearing & Speech Sciences). Leech found that the comprehension outcomes of the lower SES children could be linked to problems in their moment-by-moment language processing.