Examining Moderators of Vocabulary Acquisition from Kindergarten Throughout Elementary School Using Local Structural Equation Modeling

Does parental involvement or formal education reduce the often found competence gap between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds? To answer this question, we examined the joint and unique effects of parental education, socioeconomic status, and home learning environment on children’s vocabulary competence and growth in early childhood. We used latent growth curve models to distinguish between pre-school vocabulary competence and growth across primary school. Analyses were based on data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), a large-scale longitudinal study assessing vocabulary competence and family background from Kindergarten to the 3rd grade of elementary school. To scrutinize the moderating effects of socioeconomic status, parental education, and home learning environment on model parameters, we relied on local structural equation modeling. Results revealed a moderate positive effect of parental education on children’s receptive vocabulary competence, which fully explained the effect of socioeconomic status on this language skill. Home learning environment had no effect on children’s competence level. Initially lower performing children showed steeper growth trajectories across school, but the effect was small compared to the initial differences due to parental education. In summary, the results indicate that formal schooling helps to reduce vocabulary competence differences across children from different educational backgrounds, but are not able to fully overcome them.

本研究旨在探究父母参与或正规教育是否能够缩小来自不同社会经济背景儿童之间普遍存在的语言能力差距。为此，我们考察了父母教育程度、社会经济地位以及家庭学习环境对儿童早期词汇能力及成长的影响，并利用潜在增长曲线模型区分了学前词汇能力与小学阶段词汇能力的增长。分析基于德国国家教育面板研究（NEPS）的数据，这是一项大规模的纵向研究，评估了从幼儿园到小学三年级儿童的词汇能力和家庭背景。为了审查社会经济地位、父母教育程度和家庭学习环境对模型参数的调节作用，我们依赖局部结构方程模型。结果显示，父母教育程度对儿童接受性词汇能力的正面影响是中等的，并完全解释了社会经济地位对该语言技能的影响。家庭学习环境对儿童的能力水平没有影响。最初表现较低的学生在学校的成长轨迹更为陡峭，但与父母教育程度引起的初始差异相比，这一影响较小。总之，研究结果指出，正规教育有助于缩小来自不同教育背景的儿童在词汇能力方面的差异，但无法完全消除这些差异。