Study Links Socioeconomic Status to Children’s Reading Skills
Children whose parents have higher levels of education often develop stronger reading skills; however, a new study suggests that the key factor driving this advantage is not brain structure, but rather oral language ability.
The research, published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, suggests that vocabulary growth and phonological awareness are the most significant bridges between socioeconomic background and reading success.
For decades, researchers have observed that children from more highly educated families tend to outperform their peers in reading.
Much of the past work has focused on the brain, showing that differences in socioeconomic status sometimes coincide with differences in neural connectivity within reading-related pathways. However, the precise mechanism linking background and literacy has remained unclear.
In this study, researchers drew on data from the Healthy Brain Network, a large biobank of children and adolescents aged 6 to 15. After applying selection criteria, more than 3,000 participants remained, with over 800 of them having complete data on brain scans, oral language assessments, and reading tests.
The team used structural equation modeling, a method that allows for testing complex relationships, to untangle how socioeconomic status, brain connectivity, and language interact in shaping reading ability.
The findings were striking: socioeconomic status, measured through parental education, predicted reading performance, but the pathway linking these two factors ran through oral language skills, not structural brain differences.
Children with more educated parents tended to demonstrate stronger phonological awareness, the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in language, as well as richer vocabularies. These skills, in turn, were strongly tied to better reading fluency and comprehension.
White matter integrity, a measure of brain connectivity, showed only weak and inconsistent associations. While children of more educated parents did tend to show slightly higher white matter integrity in some regions, those differences did not reliably predict reading performance. This challenges previous assumptions that structural brain differences might explain socioeconomic disparities in literacy.
The results underscore the central role of oral language in the development of reading. Phonological awareness emerged as the strongest mediator, with vocabulary also contributing meaningfully, though to a lesser degree.
Importantly, these effects held steady across different imaging models and did not vary significantly by age, suggesting that the influence of parental education on language and reading remains stable from early childhood through adolescence.
While the study provides important insights, the authors also note its limitations. The data were cross-sectional, making it difficult to establish cause and effect. The sample, although larger and more diverse than in many neuroimaging studies, still skewed toward families with relatively high education levels.
Future research including more children from low-income backgrounds, as well as longitudinal data, will be essential for understanding how early experiences shape both brain development and literacy.
Despite these caveats, the study’s message is clear: the most powerful pathway connecting socioeconomic background to reading success runs through language itself.
By fostering rich language environments through conversation, reading aloud, and exposure to new words, parents and educators may be able to help narrow literacy gaps linked to socioeconomic differences.
