Page No 227-255
Nikita Dadlani and Sudhin Karuppali
Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore
.
The socioeconomic status is one of the key factors impeding the overall child
development, whose impact on language skills is least explored in Kannada speaking
Indian children. This study focused on assessing the morpho-syntactic language of
children from higher socio-economic (HSE) and lower socio-economic (LSE) status
using a picture description task.59 typically-developing Kannada speaking children aged
between 2 and 5 years were categorized into three age groups. The participants from
each group were further equally divided into LSE and HSE subgroups. Using a picture
description task, language samples were extracted and were analyzed for the morphosyntactic (total number of utterances and morphemes) units. Descriptive statistics were
performed to obtain the mean and SD of both the units of each participant across the age
groups. Non-parametric tests determined the level of significance between and across
the LSE and HSE subgroups (for all age groups). An overall increase in the morphosyntactic units was observed across the age groups for the HSE and LSE participants.
These findings provide an insight into how early and to what extent socio-economic
statusimpacts the morpho-syntactic development in 2, 3, and 4 year-old children..