Current literature has found that children from families in lower socioeconomic status (SES) categories have disparities in vocabulary growth than their higher SES peers. Vocabulary is an important skill for reading development, but many other skills also underlie reading achievement, like phonemic awareness (PA). We explore the role of familial SES, broken down into parental education and occupation and income, examining the relationship between SES, vocabulary and phonemic awareness. We predicted that higher SES would predict better phonemic awareness outcomes. Our sample includes 1600 children (Mean Age=10).
First, we replicated relationships between SES, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. We used a multilinear regression analysis to explore potential relationships between SES and phonemic awareness tasks when controlling for age, handedness, IQ and past diagnoses. We found that parental occupation and positive parenting were better predictors of PA than they were of higher-order reading skills (e.g., reading comprehension), suggesting that time spent reading with parents or access to educational resources may be important for PA. One interesting finding for rapid sequential naming (a PA subtest), was that income level was the only significant predictor. This demonstrates the variability between SES variables as predictors of different reading (and related) skills. Finally, we used multilinear regression to consider models with all SES variables predicting vocabulary, all PA variables predicting vocabulary, and SES and PA variables predicting vocabulary. We found that one SES subtest (parent education), three PA subtests (BW, RSN, PDE), and positive parenting are particularly meaningful additions to predicting vocabulary.