title: [Maternal education and phonological processing in preschool children].
abstract: BACKGROUND
  1.: Children's language skills seem to depend on their mothers' level of academic education; 2.: phonological processing, i. e. processing information in terms of acoustic signals with linguistic content, seems to act as an accelerator in the development of language skills. Based on these premises the aim of this study was to evaluate whether there is a correlation between the maternal level of academic education and low level phonological processing skills in children.
  
  
  METHODS
  203 preschool-children aged 5;0 to 5;11 years were enrolled in this study. Low level phonological processing was probed using minimal pairs for both words and nonwords (logatoms). The items were chosen with respect to age appropriate vocabulary, phoneme features, phoneme contrast and phoneme position.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Children, whose mothers were more highly educated, showed better results in low level phonological processing tasks than children of mothers with lower levels of academic education.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our results confirm the hypothesis that there is a correlation between a mother's level of academic education and the phonological processing skills of her child. This could also explain why children whose parents possess a higher level of education often demonstrate better linguistic skills. However, further studies are needed to clarify whether other factors act as a dependant variable.
authors.affiliation: MHH, Klinik und Poliklinik für Phoniatrie und Pädaudiologie, Hannover. Ptok.Martin@MH-Hannover.de
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ptok
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dunkelmann
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology*; D008297:Male; D009035:Mothers / Q000193:education*; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D012307:Risk Factors; D013223:Statistics as Topic