Study Says Toddlers Born to Latina Immigrants Lag Behind Whites in Basic-language Skills: Children born to immigrant Latinas are generally born healthy, but by age 2 or 3, they tend to lag behind in basic-language and cognitive skills, a new University of California, Berkeley study shows.
'We've known, for the last 10 years... that Latino kids on average are beginning kindergarten with preliteracy skills that fall below middle-class White kids,' said Dr. Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy who led the study. 'But we didn't know when it emerged. The new breakthrough is that we can now identify this fall-off in cognitive growth between 9 months and 3 years of age.'
The findings, based on a nationwide tracking study of 8,114 infants born in 2001, appeared in the Maternal and Child Health Journal, and a companion report will be published this winter in the medical journal Pediatrics.
