Early Years

An International Research Journal

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceye20

Socioeconomic status differences in the linguistic

environment: a study with Spanish-speaking
populations in Argentina

Alejandra Stein, Alejandra Beatriz Menti & Celia Renata Rosemberg

To cite this article: Alejandra Stein, Alejandra Beatriz Menti & Celia Renata Rosemberg (2021):
Socioeconomic status differences in the linguistic environment: a study with Spanish-speaking
populations in Argentina, Early Years, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2021.1904383

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2021.1904383

Published online: 27 Mar 2021.

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EARLY YEARS
https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2021.1904383

Socioeconomic status differences in the linguistic

environment: a study with Spanish-speaking populations in
Argentina
a b a
Alejandra Stein , Alejandra Beatriz Menti and Celia Renata Rosemberg
a
National Council of Scientific Research (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas),
University of Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Buenos Aires, Argentina; bNational Council of of
Scientific Research (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), National University of
Córdoba (CIFAL, UNC), Cordoba, Argentina

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Evidence shows individual variation in lexical acquisition as Received 22 October 2019
a function of socioeconomic status and linguistic input. Research Accepted 13 March 2021
has primarily involved English-speaking populations and consid­ KEYWORDS
ered only mothers’ child-directed speech. This study analyzes the Socio-economic differences;
effects of socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative language input; child-
properties of linguistic input – child-directed and overheard – to directed speech; overheard
Argentinean children, an understudied population. The data con­ speech; Spanish-speaking
sists of 54 hours of audio recording during home observations of 27 population
Spanish-learning infants (8–18 months old) from low- and middle-
socioeconomic households. Results show the different impact of
socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative input proper­
ties according to the definition of input (child-directed and over­
heard input from all participants, child-directed from the primary
caregiver) adopted in this study.

Introduction
The literature on this subject has demonstrated that during the first years of life
there is individual variation regarding lexical acquisition (Fenson et al. 1994). This
early variation in lexical development correlates with later cognitive and language
outcomes as well as with academic achievement (Snow et al. 2007). Two possible
factors contributing to this variation are socioeconomic status (SES) and differences
in children’s linguistic input (Hoff 2013; Jones and Rowland 2017). The large
majority of these studies have been carried out with Western monolingual English-
speaking populations and have only considered child-directed speech (CDS) from
mothers as the input received by the children (e.g. Hoff-Ginsberg 1991; Hoff 2003;
Rowe 2008, 2012). This article presents a study of the linguistic input – child-
directed and overheard speech (OHS) from mothers and other participants – to
which Spanish-learning infants, ages 8–18 months, from different socioeconomic
households were exposed.

CONTACT Alejandra Stein alejandrastein@yahoo.com.ar National Council of Scientific Research (Consejo

Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), University of Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Buenos
Aires, Argentina
© TACTYC
2 A. STEIN ET AL.

A group of studies has described the characteristics of the speech of parents of

different SES when interacting with their children. In their classical work, Hart and Risley
(1995) found stable differences in children’s linguistic input depending on whether
parents were on welfare or were professionals. In their daily experiences, children from
professional families heard more words and more utterances than children from working-
class and welfare families.
Subsequent research provided further evidence that the linguistic experiences of
higher-SES children from more educated families are richer in terms of the speech they
hear. Hoff (2003) found significant social class differences in mothers’ CDS: high-SES
mothers produced more word tokens, more word types and longer utterances (MLU)
than their counterparts from middle-income groups. Huttenlocher et al. (2007) also found
differences in the input received by children whose mothers had different levels of
education, which is a proxy of SES. According to their study, mothers with higher levels
of education produced more word tokens, word types and words per sentence when
talking to their children. Rowe (2008, 2012) found relationships between CDS and SES as
well: parents from more educated and privileged backgrounds talked more, used a more
diverse lexicon, and produced longer utterances and a smaller proportion of directive
utterances with their children.
Although results from previous studies showed variations in input according to SES,
not all agree the ways in which aspects of input differ. Diverse results may be due to the
fact that the datasets used in the studies involved participants with different age and SES
profiles, and that the studies employed diverse methodological procedures that affected
the data.
Most of the studies previously mentioned analyzed mother–child interactions at home
for brief periods of time or in the presence of an observer for video recording. The speech
recorded in these studies was directed to the child, as many studies have shown that the
quantity and quality of CDS is a better predictor of linguistic development than adult-
directed speech (Rowe 2008; Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow 2012; Shneidman et al.
2013; Weisleder and Fernald 2013). Indeed, many correlational and predictive studies
have shown that the linguistic input directed to children during the first years of life has
an effect on semantic, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of linguistic
development in children (Hart and Risley 1995; Hoff 2003; Hurtado, Marchman, and
Fernald 2008; Huttenlocher et al. 2002; Lieven 2010; Rowe 2008, 2012; Weizman and
Snow 2001). Nevertheless, recent studies have provided evidence that questions the
relative contribution of directed vs. overheard speech to language learning (Akhtar
2005; Shneidman et al. 2009). Along these lines, Akhtar (2005) showed that by 25 months
old, children can learn new labels through overhearing third-party interactions, even
when engaged by a distractor toy. Although in the present study we will not analyze
the impact of input on infant language, these studies as a whole have highlighted the
relevance of studying linguistic input. It is also very important to consider the definition of
input that the research is based upon – CDS, OHS, speech from the mother, speech from
other participants. In this regard, Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) argue that differences in
input according to SES can be found depending on the definition of the vocabulary
environment adopted (i.e., speech of the primary caregiver to the child vs. total input).
Only two of the reviewed studies involved understudied populations or analyzed
extensive recordings not limited to mother–child interactions and addressed the
 EARLY YEARS 3

differences in the linguistic properties between both CDS and OHS (or adult-directed
speech). In one of those studies, Weisleder and Fernald (2013) analyzed the linguistic
input to low-SES Latino children living in the United States. They found great intra-group
variability in the amount of adult speech accessible to the infants, both child-directed and
overheard. These differences in parental engagement were uncorrelated with maternal
education. Furthermore, the amount of CDS was not correlated with the amount of OHS,
which suggests that the observed differences in speech directed to children were not due
to overall differences in talkativeness among families but rather to caregivers’ degree of
verbal engagement with the infants.
In their research, Casillas et al. (2017) used a dataset that consisted of a sub-sample
from four corpora which differed in terms of the age and SES of participants, in order to
analyze the effect of SES (using maternal education as a proxy) and gender on the total
amount of speech and on speech directed to children. They reported an effect of child
gender on input: mothers incremented their CDS with child age when talking to male
infants. Regarding SES, they found no effect of education on the proportion of CDS
accessible to the children. They attributed this result to the binary measure used (uni­
versity degree/none) for educational level. Regarding the total amount of speech (mea­
sured as tokens heard by each child), the results showed that children in households
where mothers had higher levels of education heard more speech than children whose
mothers did not have a university degree.
Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) analyzed extant corpus from five studies that com­
bined ethnographic fieldwork with longitudinal home observations of 42 children (18–­
48 months old) interacting with family members in everyday life contexts. The
participating children lived in diverse socioeconomic households (middle-class, working-
class and poor groups). The analysis considered speech by the primary caregiver to the
focal child, speech by all caregivers to the focal child, and all ambient speech within the
child’s hearing. Results revealed substantial variation in vocabulary environments within
each socioeconomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that
exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the
number of words to which low-income children are exposed.

The present study

The aforementioned studies document profound differences in input as a function of
familial SES. However, most have involved English-speaking and relatively educated and
affluent populations; few studies have included participants with incomplete high school
as a maximum educational level. From Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model
(Bronfenbrenner and Morris 1998) this study assumes that development results from
a nested set of social contexts in which the child is embedded and different social
environments may promote distinct levels and trajectories of language development
(Hoff 2006). It is therefore important to study differences in linguistic input based on
SES in other cultural groups. The present study, therefore, aims to analyze the effects of
SES on input in other cultures and with participants of other educational levels, such as
those in the Argentinean populations studied.
In addition, studies have generally analyzed maternal speech, but have not considered
input from other participants in children’s environments. Not all input to the infant comes
4 A. STEIN ET AL.

from the mother (Soderstrom 2007). Furthermore, children from diverse social and
cultural backgrounds do not participate as often as Western middle-income families in
dyadic interactions with their mothers (Rogoff 2011; Rosemberg, Stein, and Alam 2013;
Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow 2012; Sperry, Sperry, and Miller 2018; Volk and De Acosta
2004). The quantity, as well as the characteristics of the participants (i.e., child vs. adult)
present in the environment, may affect the quantitative and qualitative properties of the
linguistic input to which children are exposed, both child-directed and overheard.
Considering the fact that children from other sociocultural groups interact with diverse
and multiple interlocutors and that the mother may not be the primary caregiver or the
primary speaker (Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow 2012), the present study considers
different definitions of input in the analysis performed: total input, OHS and CDS from
all the participants, CDS from the primary speaker. We predict differences regarding SES in
the total input from all the participants, in CDS and the input received by the primary
speaker.
Lastly, although previous studies have focused on the characteristics of CDS, not all
speech infants hear is child-directed. It is possible that children do learn from OHS, in
which case describing its characteristics would be relevant. Indeed, as previously men­
tioned, recent studies have suggested that children learn new vocabulary through over­
hearing, pointing to the importance of addressing OHS and not only CDS in children’s
input (Akhtar 2005). Only a few studies have comparatively analyzed quantitative char­
acteristics of CDS and OHS (Sperry, Sperry, and Miller 2018; Weisleder and Fernald 2013)
but none of them have analyzed qualitative characteristics of OHS. Considering these few
studies we predict a different impact of SES in CDS and in OHS.
In sum, the present work aims to discover more about the properties of CDS as
compared to OHS as a function of SES.

Method
Participants
Twenty-seven toddlers and their families living in Buenos Aires participated in the study
(14 low SES, 13 mid SES). They were drawn from a larger sample of 72 families1 who are
participating in a longitudinal language development investigation that includes socio­
economically diverse Argentinean families (Corpus: Rosemberg et al. 2015). The corpus
was gathered, transcribed and annotated in the framework of the project ‘Vocabulario,
narración y argumentación infantil. Un estudio psicolingüístico y sociocultural’ [Vocabulary,
narration and argumentation in infancy. A psycholinguistic and sociocultural study.], with
the financial support of MINCyT and CONICET (Grants to author: PIP 80/15, PICT 2014/
3327), Argentina.
The low-SES families were recruited through daycare centers and community kitchens
in which members of the research team have carried out early literacy programs for many
years. Middle-SES families were recruited through an Internet call and social networks. All
were interviewed and answered an oral questionnaire with the following information: the
family’s place of origin, languages spoken at home, medical antecedents of the target
child, household size, relationship between the cohabitants and the target child, birth
order of the participating child, schooling of other children in the family, adults’
 EARLY YEARS 5

occupation and level of education, information about any kind of welfare they received
from the government.
We considered maternal education as a proxy for SES. We categorized a family as
middle SES if the mother had completed a university or teaching degree (years of
maternal education range: 14–22 years, mean: 17.2, sd: 3.2). Adults in families categorized
as low SES had at most completed secondary school (years of maternal education range:
6–13 years, mean: 10, sd: 2.6).
One salient characteristic of large Argentinian cities, such as Buenos Aires, is social
urban fragmentation, reflected in great variation in housing and evidenced in markedly
different material living conditions for families residing in the same city. Therefore, we also
considered the neighborhood of the household as an additional criterion for SES categor­
ization. Indeed these external social contexts in which a child develops determine the
family’s access to resources (Bronfenbrenner and Morris 1998). To be included in the low-
SES group the family needed to live in an impoverished neighborhood with insufficient or
nonexistent infrastructure and services. Although most of these neighborhoods are
connected to the municipal network for drinking water, many of them lack sewers and
natural gas connections. The neighborhoods that are at the extreme end can be char­
acterized as urban marginalized slums (usually called ‘villas de emergencia’) with very
precarious housing, built partly from wood and salvaged materials. They are generally
accessed by narrow dirt or cement alleyways.
The criteria for including the children in the two groups took into account both
parameters (maternal education and housing), which are closely related indicators of
SES, given the urban social fragmentation that currently characterizes Argentinian urban
centers. SES groups were balanced in terms of age (see Table 1) as well as gender (8
females and 5 males in low SES and 7 females and 7 males in mid-SES group).
Spanish was the first language in all the families and the one used in everyday
interactions.

Procedures
Data collection
Families were visited in their homes. The researcher put a vest with a digital recorder on to
the participant child and was not present during the recording. No instructions were
given to the families regarding who should be present at the visit. We encouraged the
families to interact as they normally would if the child did not have the digital recorder.
After four hours the researcher retrieved the recorder.

Table 1. Description of participants. Means (SD) for selected

variables in each of the SES groups.
Low SES Mid SES
Age (months) 13.1 (4.7) 14.3 (3.4)
Maternal education (years) 10 (2.6) 17.2 (3.2)
No. Siblings 1.1 (1.4) 0.8 (0.9)
No. Family members 5.6 (2.5) 2.7 (0.9)
No. Speakers 9.2 (4.5) 4.1 (1.4)
6 A. STEIN ET AL.

The families signed informed consent forms. The research project was assessed by the
corresponding commissions from the National Council of Scientific and Technical
Research and follows the ethical norms of the institution (CONICET 2006).

Transcription
All speech (54 hours, 28 from the low SES and 26 from the mid-SES group) was transcribed
using the CHAT format (Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts) (MacWhinney 2000).
Four hours were recorded in each child’s home, of which the second and third were
transcribed. The speech was broken into utterances. Three criteria were used to cluster
the sequences of words that constitute an utterance and to segment them from the
others included in the same interactional turn: a pause longer than 2 seconds, intonation
and syntactic completion. Two of these three criteria must be met in order to be
considered a separate utterance (Bernstein and Brundage 2015).
In order to guarantee transcription reliability, a second researcher checked the tran­
scription. Reliability was interpreted as accuracy of word orthographic transcription and
utterance segmentation.

Input language measures

Through the use of CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis) (MacWhinney 2000), the
linguistic input that children were exposed to during 120-min interactions was codified
differentiating the two types of addressee considered in the study: CDS and OHS. The
utterances that were directed either to a target child or to a group of individuals that
included a target child were coded as CDS. OHS included both speech directed to other
children (excluding the target child) and speech directed to adults.
We also used CLAN to calculate the following measures (dependent variables). The
two types of input, CDS and OHS, were analyzed for speech measures that provide
information about the general semantic and syntactic features of the language to which
our sample of Argentinean children were exposed. As a measure of the amount of
speech heard by the child, we considered the number of words (word tokens) and
utterances in both CDS and OHS. Vocabulary diversity was measured through a) the
number of different words (word types) and b) MATTR (moving-average type-token
ratio, considering a window length of 10 words). MATTR controls the volume of speech,
so as to estimate lexical diversity in a less biased way (Covington and McFall 2010). As
a proxy of syntactic complexity, we analyzed the mean length of utterances of CDS and
OHS in words (MLU).
The proportion of CDS was measured by considering the proportion of word tokens
that were addressed to the child over the whole number of tokens, the proportion of
word types (the same, but using word types) and the proportion of utterances (the same,
but using utterances).
We employed broad criteria regarding what we considered a word. We included: a)
lemmas: ‘gato’ (cat); b) inflected forms: ‘gatos’ (cats); c) derived forms: ‘lluvioso’ (rainy); d)
compounds: ‘lavarropas’ (washing machine); e) proper nouns; f) conventional expressions
frequently used by children or adults when speaking with toddlers, for example: ‘mema’
(bottle), ‘chiche’ (toy), ‘upa’ (holding the child); and g) onomatopoeias. All dialectal
phonetic equivalents were reduced to a standard spelling across transcripts. Inflected
forms were considered different types of words. The distinction between uppercase
 EARLY YEARS 7

letters and lowercase letters was not considered. Homographs were counted as the same
word. Compound words were considered as one word count (Brysbaert et al. 2016).

Analysis
We carried out a descriptive analysis of the linguistic environments in the low- and
middle-SES families participating in the study: means, SD and ranges were calculated
for all the dependent variables considered (types, tokens, MATTR, utterances and MLU) in
CDS, OHS and the total input to which the children from the two groups were exposed.
We also calculated descriptive measures of tokens, types and utterances as a proportion
of CDS.
We then proceeded to analyze the factors that explain the differences found in the
input to which both groups of children were exposed using the regression analyses
described below:
1) We carried out a linear multiple regression analysis in order to establish the propor­
tion of variance in quantitative and qualitative aspects of the input – CDS and OHS – that
are explained by SES. The model considers the input children receive from all the
participants in the situation. We hypothesize an impact of SES, especially on the qualita­
tive characteristics of CDS. Given that children from low-income households daily interact
with multiple interlocutors that produce speech, there might be minor differences
between social groups regarding the quantity of OHS.
2) We carried out a linear multiple regression analysis in order to determine the
variance in quantitative and qualitative aspects of CDS input from the primary speaker
that is explained by SES. Previous studies that have shown differences in CDS according to
SES have only considered mother speech who, in the participating population, is the
primary caregiver. As in the sample considered in the present study, the mother is not
necessarily the primary caregiver, we decided to analyze the impact of SES on CDS from
the primary caregiver, who she/he is (e.g. father, grandmother, older sibling). Considering
findings from previous studies, we hypothesize an impact of SES on CDS from the primary
caregiver.
3) We carried out a logistic regression analysis in order to establish the variance in the
proportion of types, tokens and utterances in CDS that are explained by SES and number
of speakers. We hypothesize there is an impact of SES as well as of the number of speakers
in CDS. Children from middle-income households daily interact with fewer interlocutors
than their counterparts from low-income homes. It is possible the number of speakers
diminishes or cancels the impact of SES on input.
As a whole, the different models sought to analyze the full verbal environment to
which the participant children were exposed. As previously mentioned, in understudied
households, such as Argentinean ones, this approach may be more appropriate to
characterize these environments than considering only child-directed input from the
mother. All the models control for child age.

Results
Descriptive analysis of the linguistic environment in low- and middle-SES families in
Argentina
8 A. STEIN ET AL.

We first carried out a descriptive analysis of selected quantitative and qualitative

characteristics of the total amount of CDS and OHS received by both groups of children.
We considered the speech of all participants in the situation except that of the target
child. Descriptive statistics for all the dependent variables of input – number of tokens,
number of types, number of utterances, lexical diversity (MATTR) and syntactic complexity
(MLU) – are provided separately for CDS and OHS, as well as for both types of input jointly,
considering differences in SES in Table 2.
As can be seen in Table 2, the standard deviations reported show that both
social groups are characterized by great intra-group variability regarding all input
measures considered. When we consider the total amount of input and the OHS,
the linguistic environment of low-SES toddlers is made up of more word tokens,
more word types and more utterances than that of their middle-SES peers.
However, children from middle-SES households are exposed to more word types,
more word tokens and more utterances in the speech directed to them. When we
take into account qualitative aspects of input, such as MATTR and MLU, the means
reported show similar values – in OHS, CDS and both considered jointly – in low
and middle-SES groups.
Table 3 reports the proportion of CDS received by the middle and low-SES groups.
While the input received at home by middle-SES toddlers consists of at least 46% CDS,
as measured by types, tokens and utterances, this kind of input only reaches a maximum
31% of the total speech in the linguistic environments of low-SES households.
Nevertheless, descriptive measures referred to the proportion of CDS show great varia­
bility within each group.
The examination of CDS and OHS input differences according to SES are delved further
in the predictive analyses presented below.

Table 2. Means (SD) for quantity and quality of input measures during 120-min interactions registered
in each of the SES groups (N=27).
Low SES Mid SES
Total input CDS OHS Total input CDS OHS
Types 866.5 (302.3) 224.5 (113.4) 775.9 (293.6) 679.8 (227.7) 369.3 (200.4) 444.7 (244.2)
Tokens 4337.2 (1888.8) 896.5 (620.4) 3440.7 (1711.2) 3536.4 (1820.7) 1755 (1250.5) 1781.4 (1300.6)
MATTR 0.88 (0.02) 0.8 0.9 0.88 (0.03) 0.85 0.87 (0.07)
(0.03) (0.02) (0.04)
Utterances 911.9 (337.5) 272.2 (204.6) 639.8 (292.6) 802.3 (313.7) 416.9 (231.6) 385.4 (258)
MLU 3.7 3.08 4.02 3.94 (0.66) 3.74 3.87
(0.64) (0.64) (0.66) (0.9) (1.13)

Table 3. Proportion of CDS received by children in both of the SES groups during 120-min interactions
at home (N=27).
Low SES Middle SES
Mean SD Range Mean SD Range
Types 0.23 0.09 0.12-0.45 0.46 0.22 0.08-0.84
Tokens 0.22 0.13 0.07-0.58 0.49 0.26 0.05-0.95
Utterances 0.31 0.17 0.09-0.73 0.53 0.23 0.08-0.95
 EARLY YEARS 9

The predictive power of SES in explaining differences in input to Argentinean

toddlers
Given the descriptive analyses presented above, we decided to assess the degree of
variance in the features of the input – CDS and OHS – due to SES, controlling for the age of
the children. Therefore, we implemented six different multiple linear regression models
reported in Tables 4 and 5. In all of them, we declared SES and age as predictors over the
following dependent variables characterizing quantitative and qualitative aspects of CDS
and OHS input: number of tokens, lexical diversity as measured by MATTR and MLU in
words.
As evidenced in Table 4, SES has an effect on the three measures considered in
CDS. The child-directed input, as measured by total amount of tokens, MATTR and
words per utterance, decreases in low SES households. We also observed a significant
effect of age on the amount of tokens and on the mean length of utterances
directed to the children: both measures increase with age. We did not observe
a significant effect of age on MATTR.
As can be seen in Table 5, we also observed an effect of SES on the amount of tokens
and on MATTR in OHS but in the opposite direction found in the results reported in Table
4. Low SES children are exposed to a greater and more diverse overheard input. We did
not observe an effect of SES on the mean length of utterance in OHS. Regarding the effect
of age, MATTR and the length of the utterances diminishes as children get older, although
the expected average change is low. We did not find an effect of age on the amount of
tokens in OHS.
Given the relevance of CDS for children’s linguistic development, we deepened the
analysis of the characteristics of CDS as a function of SES. As children from diverse

Table 4. Multiple regression models predicting quantitative and qualitative characteristics of

CDS from all participants (N=27).
Dependent variables (CDS)
Total amount of tokens MATTR Words per utterance
Predictors ß (se)
Intercept 10.42 (652.8) 0.81*** (0.03) 2.34*** (0.51)
SES group −487.07* (182.6) −0.024** (0.008) −0.38** (0.14)
Age 95.72* (45.7) 0.001 (0.002) 0.08* (0.04)
F-stat 5.03** 4.99** 5.2*
R2 (%) 24 24 24
p < *0.05 **0.01 ***0.001

Table 5. Multiple regression models predicting quantitative and qualitative characteristics of

OHS (N=27).
Dependent variables (OHS)
Total amount of tokens MATTR Words per utterance
Predictors ß (se)
Intercept 1992.9 (1066.4) 0.98*** (0.03) 5.43*** (0.55)
SES group 802.5* (298.3) 0.02* (0.009) 0.08 (0.15)
Age 45 (74.6) −0.007** (0.002) −0.12** (0.04)
F-stat 4.14* 6.06** 4.6*
R2 (%) 20 28 22
p < *0.05 **0.01 ***0.001
10 A. STEIN ET AL.

sociocultural groups interact with different and multiple interlocutors, and because the
mother may not be the primary caregiver or the primary speaker, the present study
sought to examine whether the child-directed input in the two groups differed when
only the primary speaker was considered. With this purpose, we first identified the
participants present in the situations who verbally interacted most with the children in
each of the social groups included in the study: 30% of the primary speakers in the low-
SES households and 20% in middle-SES families were different from the mother (e.g.,
father, grandmother, babysitter). According to the information gathered through the
parental interviews, in all cases, the primary speaker coincided with the child’s primary
caregiver.
Like the results displayed in Table 4, the findings included in Table 6 demonstrate
a main effect of SES on the quantity and diversity of input, as measured by CDS from
a primary speaker. When talking to the children, the primary caregivers from low-SES
households produced a smaller number of tokens and a less diverse speech than their
middle-SES counterparts. However, we did not find an effect of SES on the mean length of
utterances. Similarly to results reported in Table 4, there is an effect of age on the length
of the utterances as well as on the number of tokens received by children in CDS: older
children hear more words and longer utterances directed to them.
In order to examine the SES differences in the proportion of CDS, reported in Table 3,
we carried out a logistic regression analysis. As mentioned above, in the low-SES
Argentinean households sample, children daily interact with a greater number of speakers
than their middle-SES peers. Does this fact affect the proportion of speech directed to the
children? In the following regression models, we included the number of speakers as an
additional predictor to analyze its effect on the proportion of CDS.
Results displayed in Table 7 show that SES as well as the number of speakers
and age are significant predictors of the proportion of CDS. We found that like­
lihood of CDS as measured by proportion of tokens, types and utterances
decreased in low-SES households. We also found that likelihood of CDS diminishes
with the number of speakers and that CDS increased with age.

Discussion
The present study analyzed the effects of SES on input to children in Argentinean house­
holds. This understudied population differs from those previously studied in that it

Table 6. Multiple regression models predicting quantitative and qualitative charac­

teristics of CDS from primary speaker (N=27).
Dependent variables
Tokens MATTR Words per utterance
Predictors ß (se)
Intercept −501.02 (585.7) 34.13* (12.9) 2.18** (0.6)
SES group −574.9** (163.8) −11.49** (3.62) −0.32 (0.17)
Age 109.45* (40.96) 0.6 (0.91) 0.1* (0.04)
F-stat 8.5*** 5.07** 3.79*
R2 (%) 37 24 18
p < *0.05 **0.01 ***0.001
 EARLY YEARS 11

Table 7. Logistic regression models predicting the proportion of CDS from all participants (N=27).
Dependent variables
Proportion of tokens Proportion of types Proportion of utterances
Predictors ß (se)
Intercept −0.72* (0.03) −0.84* (0.06) 0.04 (0.06)
SES group −0.41* (0.009) −0.49* (0.02) −0.19* (0.02)
N of speakers −0.09* (0.002) −0.054* (0.005) −0.1* (0.005)
Age 0.05* (0.002) 0.056* (0.004) 0.02* (0.003)
PseudoR2 (%) 42 40 30
p < *0.0001

presents greater variation regarding the different dimensions included in the definition of
SES. Specifically, the variation in the educational level reached by adults is more marked,
as well as in the material conditions of housing, and the type and stability of parental
occupation. Moreover, the low- and middle-income families that participated in the
present study differ from one another in family composition and the number of people
that interact with the children on a daily basis. Children from low-SES households live in
extended families that include not only their parents and siblings but also other relatives
and close relations, such as uncles, grandparents, cousins and neighbors, among others.
The linguistic environment of low-SES children consists of speech from multiple
participants who may speak to the target child or to other interlocutors. Understanding
a child’s early encounters with language in these households requires a naturalistic
approach that considers the total amount of input – OHS and CDS from different
participants – instead of only CDS from the mother. Thus, in the present study, we
analyzed differences in the linguistic environment (CDS and OHS) due to SES and the
number of speakers in conjunction.
The descriptive results showed that, on average, there is a considerable range of
variation in the number of tokens in CDS to Argentinean children within both social
groups. The amount of CDS heard by those middle-SES Argentinean children who are
exposed to the largest amount of input is similar to the average number of tokens
addressed to children from professional families, as reported by Hart and Risley (1995)
(approximately 1,750 tokens in 1 hour when children were 13–16 months old). Likewise,
the quantity of tokens heard by those low-SES Argentinean children who are exposed to
the largest amount of input is similar to the average amount of input registered by Hart
and Risley in ‘welfare’ households (approximately 600 words in 1 hour when children were
13–16 months old). The great intra-group variation measured in the input received by the
27 children participating in the present study coincides with the variability observed in
previous research (Sperry, Sperry, and Miller 2018; Weisleder and Fernald 2013). This intra-
group variation that characterizes the different samples and populations studied reveals
the need to be cautious about comparing raw numbers reported in studies that differ not
only in the age and sociocultural characteristics of the populations involved but also in
terms of the methodological procedures followed in data gathering (video vs. audio;
presence vs. absence of an observer; hours registered; naturalness of the situations
registered).
How different are the linguistic environments in these low- and middle-SES
Argentinean households? Descriptive results showed that low-SES children are exposed
12 A. STEIN ET AL.

to a greater amount of input than their middle-SES peers: they hear more word tokens,
types and utterances in the total input. Nevertheless, the input to the former group is
mostly made up of OHS. Conversely, their middle-SES peers hear a greater amount of CDS,
as measured by both quantity and proportion of tokens, types and utterances.
The results of the regression analysis revealed a principal effect of SES on the number
of tokens in the total input that constitute the children’s linguistic environments. These
results coincide with the findings of Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) in their study with
diverse-SES English-speaking populations from the United States. According to their
results, the total ambient speech in the poor Black Belt community exceeded that of
the professional families. Our results differ from those reported by Weisleder and Fernald
(2013), who observed no relationship between the amount of OHS input and the years of
maternal education (one of the SES proxies) in a sample of Spanish-learning infants living
in the United States. The present findings also differ from Casillas et al. (2017), who found
an effect of SES on the total quantity of OHS. While in our study, the children from low SES
households heard a greater amount of OHS, Casillas et al. (2017) found that children
whose mothers reached university education heard a greater number of tokens.
Considering the fact that there is evidence that children develop strategies to learn
language from interactions that they overhear, or as bystanders in conversations between
others (Akhtar 2005; Silva, Correa-Chávez, and Rogoff 2010), it is worth questioning what
effect this higher level of OHS input received by low-SES Argentinean children may have
on their linguistic development.
Nonetheless, with respect to CDS, our findings replicate the great majority of previous
studies (Hart and Risley 1995; Hoff 2003; Huttenlocher et al. 2007; Rowe 2008, 2012): the
low-SES children participating in the present study heard fewer tokens in CDS from their
primary caregivers compared to middle-SES children. In the former group of Argentinean
children, a smaller proportion of tokens, types, and utterances in the CDS provided by all
participants in the interactional situation was also registered. Interestingly, the methodo­
logical approach of the present study – which aims to capture the language environment
at home through a more ecological approach, without restricting data collection to the
mother-child dyad – identified a main effect of number of speakers in CDS controlling for
SES: there is a decrease in the proportion of CDS with the increase of the number of
speakers.
Regarding the impact of SES on the qualitative characteristics of CDS, the present study
replicates results in English speaking populations (Huttenlocher et al. 2007; Rowe 2008) in
that children from the middle-SES group are exposed to greater lexical diversity and
longer utterances from all participants as well from the primary caregiver, compared to
their low-SES peers. Nevertheless, the latter group of children are exposed to greater
lexical diversity in OHS. It is worth noting that previous studies have not analyzed the
qualitative characteristics of OHS.
The greater lexical diversity of the CDS heard by middle-SES children should be taken
into consideration, especially given that, as illustrated by Jones and Rowland (2017), the
lexical diversity of the language input is more important than its quantity for learning
sublexical and lexical knowledge, performing language tests that are highly predictive of
a child’s language ability, and vocabulary learning more generally.
The quantitative differences in the speech directed to the children of both social
groups may be the result of differences in the beliefs that the adults of distinct
 EARLY YEARS 13

backgrounds have about child development (Rowe 2008), as well as their own role as
interlocutors in conversations (Silva, Correa-Chávez, and Rogoff 2010). In the case of this
particular Argentinean low-SES group composed of extended families, the material living
conditions – in which a great number of people are living in the same house – also
contribute to the higher amount of OHS to which the children are exposed, as well as the
reduced amount of CDS.
The differences in the qualitative aspect mentioned may be closely related to literacy
levels. The low-SES Argentinean children are part of families in which the adults have not
only completed fewer years of schooling than in the mid-SES households but are also
affected by the qualitative disparities in education due to the fact that disadvantaged
populations go through school systems with typically lower levels of performance and
human, material and pedagogical resources (Tiramonti 2005). Unlike the quantitative
differences in the CDS that may be attributable to cultural differences, the variation in
the quality of linguistic input is the result of unequal access to goods and services due to
conditions of social exclusion.
Our results should be considered cautiously, in that they involve a small number of
children. Indeed, some studies have demonstrated the existence of variations between
different communities within the same social group – differences that may be greater than
those found between different social groups (Sperry, Sperry, and Miller 2018). Nonetheless,
the results obtained reveal significant differences in CDS and OHS both intra- and inter-
group, and illustrate the relevance of a naturalistic approach to the home linguistic
environment that allows us to truly capture and describe the early childhood experience,
as support for theoretical inferences about the role of input in language development.

Note
1. The larger sample is under construction. This paper involves the analysis of the data that were
collected, transcribed and annotated at the moment of realization of the study, and that
accomplished the SES parameters considered.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicasy Técnicas [PIP 80/
15]; Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, Argentina [PICT 2014/3327].

ORCID
Alejandra Stein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9857-0463
Alejandra Beatriz Menti http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9226-2582
Celia Renata Rosemberg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5343-5652
14 A. STEIN ET AL.

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