PHYSORG
Young children whose families immigrate to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States are as prepared and capable of starting school as their native-born counterparts, with one exception—vocabulary and language development. That’s the finding of a new study published in the September/October 2012 issue of the journal Child Development in a special section on the children of immigrants.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Bristol, Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, the University of New South Wales, the University of Ottawa, and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), an independent research institute. “In spite of important differences in some of the resources immigrant parents have to invest in their children, and in immigrant selection rules and settlement policies, across the four countries there are significant similarities in the relative positions of 4- and 5-year-old children of immigrants,” notes Elizabeth Washbrook, lecturer in education at the University of Bristol, who led the study.
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