Reducing early language disparities: A key to lifelong academic, socioeconomic, and health success

The long-term aim of the project is to support the community’s goal to close educational achievement gaps and health disparities across ethnicities and socioeconomic groups. The project is grounded in an already-funded two-year project, LENA Start Implementation and Evaluation, focused on implementing a parent education intervention to promote child language development, skills critical to human development. We now expand the scope, investigators, and community connections related to the LENA Start project. We aim to build and sustain an interdisciplinary collaborative team that will (a) use its collective knowledge to implement state-of-the-art procedures for assessing language development at scale; (b) develop new procedures to extend assessments and treatment procedures to new language groups; and (c) deepen analyses of data to identify factors affecting outcomes to create more effective interventions. Our team will have a clear and strong focus on early development of children at risk in ways that set the foundation for lifelong learning and social well-being.