Universal Environment: The Socioeconomic Status Of Children

Hoff introduces her article by stating that under normal circumstances all children “learn to talk” and that it is almost inevitable to not do so if the environmental support is there. The author goes on to stating that children acquire language under different circumstances and that their social contexts have a lot to do with the way they develop their language skills. Throughout the article, Hoff discusses how these environmental contexts provide children with the opportunities to use language and find opportunities to communicate with others. In the section of Universal environment, Hoff targets the issues of how in some cultures, children are talked to more often than in others, while in other cultures children are witnesses to adults’

Children whose parents belong to higher SES are significantly more exposed to hear new words, since they hear 90,000 more words than the children who belong to parents of lower SES. Not only do children of lower SES hear less words per week, but they also “heard an average of 11 prohibitions per hour compared to 5 for the children of professional parents” (Hoff, 2006). Additionally, Hoff illustrates how mothers who were college-educated conversed with their toddler children by asking them questions and using more complex vocabulary than mothers who only were high school-educated. Parents from higher SES engage more in joint-reading to their children, and as a result children are exposed to a richer vocabulary. What this SES brings to mind is the Projection Problem and how if there no greater exposure to language, children are faced with the Poverty of the Stimulus. Noam Chomsky’s argument of the Poverty of the Stimulus brings to light that if children are not exposed to rich context from their environment in regards to language, children will not have enough information to perform more complex grammatical operations. In another claim that go hand-by-hand, Hoff discuss the influence the age of the caregiver has in terms of language

It really was an eye opener to many of the issues she covered in this journal, like the how children of higher SES hear almost the double of words than children from lower SES hear per week. This brought back my own experience as a child who belonged and stills does to a family of lower SES. My mother was a single parents whose thoughts were more occupied about providing for her children with their daily needs that she never even thought about taking the time to read a book to me or my siblings. Whenever she got home from work, she would go straight to her room and little conversation was made throughout the rest of the evening. As opposed to my mother, even before my son was born I read to him books. To this argument, I do have a suggestion, my family and I recieve Welfare services and both my husband and I are college educated, but were are classified on the lower SES. I had my son at the age of nineteen, and as opposed to the young mothers and my own mother who utter very few words to their children, I completely did the opposite. I read to my son, I spoke affectionately to him often, and I always did the object labeling. To this day, I continue to read to him and as well for my daughter. Sadly, there wasn’t any studies that investigated families on the lower SES that are also in the process of getting a higher SES.