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Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

ANN ARBOR — Many factors influence human language development, and a new paper suggests childhood poverty could be among them.

“Language processing following childhood poverty: Evidence for disrupted neural networks,” published this year in the journal Brain and Language, finds that childhood poverty appears to disrupt language processing neural networks in adulthood.

The paper examined data from 51 adults in a longitudinal study of childhood poverty, sorting them by childhood income level. According to Suzanne Perkins, Ph.D., a research investigator at the Institute for Social Research’s (ISR) Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD),  the examination revealed differences between income groups.

“We saw some differences that may be evidence of potentially slightly developmentally delayed language processing in the poverty group,” Perkins said.

The paper specifically addresses the stress of growing up in a home affected by poverty, exploring the ways in which it can affect educational attainment and language development. The stress itself can come in many different forms from many different sources.

“People who live in poverty tend to live in more crowded homes, closer to things like airports and highways where the decibel level in the home is louder. There’s obvious stressors in the family of worrying about bills and all of the stressors associated with poverty,” she said. “We were interested in whether language is a mechanism that holds some people back from educational attainment and from career attainment that we see in adults who have grown up in poverty environments.”

The paper suggests that poverty may be a factor in language development. The adults in the study participated in a task that measured their language processing ability, finding that study participants from the lower-income sample had different language processing skills. The finding represents a small difference in ability, but potentially a significant one. 

“I think one big implication of this finding is the opportunity to expand community college programs for adults coming back into education,” Perkins said. “Both people who are working with adults who find language difficult to deal with and people who are coming into these language environments shouldn’t be discouraged by feeling like it’s complex and hard, and realizing that we may have to find ways to be able to work with challenges around language, since they have brain processes that are already compensating and helping them to solve these problems.”

The full text of the paper is available via Science Direct.