Disadvantaged kids may have poor verbal skills

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Living in severelydisadvantaged neighborhoods has a profound and lasting negativeimpact on children's verbal language skills, according toresearch published today.
"This is important because language skills are a provenindicator of success later in life," said study investigatorRobert J. Sampson of Harvard University, Cambridge,Massachusetts.
"What is surprising," he added, "is the durability of theeffect, continuing even when the child moves out of theneighborhood," he added.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Science Early Edition.
The study involved more than 2,000 children from the lower,middle and upper classes, who were between 6 and 12 years oldand living in Chicago at the beginning of the study.
The researchers followed the children for 7 years startingin the mid-1990s as they moved in and out of neighborhoods inChicago and to other parts of the United States. On threedifferent occasions, they conducted interviews with thechildren and their caretakers and had the children take avocabulary and reading test.
Sampson and colleagues focused their analyses on the 772African-American children in the study because, they explain,almost one third of the black children were exposed to high"concentrated disadvantage" compared to virtually no white orLatino children.
The results showed that, by the end of the study, blackchildren who lived in a disadvantaged neighborhood had fallenbehind otherwise identical peers who did not live in theseareas by about four points on an IQ test -- the equivalent ofmissing 1 year of school.
Growing up in an extremely disadvantaged environment has"detrimental and long-lasting consequences for black children,"they continue. Investment should be made in "a morecomprehensive approach to investing in and thereby improving"the verbal abilities of these children.
SOURCE: PNAS Early Edition, December 17, 2007.