Beyond the Home: Ecological and Socioeconomic Influences on Language Production in Multilingual Early Learners

This exploratory study examined associations between socioeconomic status (SES), green space access, and screen time with language production abilities in 22 multilingual children from Guilan and Sistan and Baluchestan—two Iranian provinces with markedly different ecological profiles. Using snowball sampling, participants (aged 6–8 years) were selected based on fluency in Farsi, Gilaki or Baluchi, and basic English. Language production was assessed using three measures derived from transcribed audio samples containing at least 175 utterances per language: Words Per Minute (WPM), Number of Different Words (NDW), and Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes. Given the small sample size and violation of parametric assumptions, Mann–Whitney U tests were conducted with a Bonferroni-adjusted significance threshold (p < .006). Results revealed non-significant trends suggesting that children in greener environments and higher-SES backgrounds exhibited greater verbal fluency (WPM) and lexical diversity (NDW), with large effect sizes (rank-biserial r = 0.446–0.669) but low statistical power (0.17–0.32). No differences emerged for screen time exposure across any language measure (all p > .78). These preliminary findings, while not statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons, suggest that environmental and socioeconomic contexts may independently influence language production in multilingual children. The study’s limitations—including its small, non-random sample and reliance on regional green space proxies rather than individual exposure measures—underscore the need for larger, methodologically robust investigations capable of examining potential interaction effects among these variables.

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