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Latent Profile Analysis: Understanding Dialect Change and Early Reading Comprehension in African American Children (309589)

Keywords: Latent Profile Analysis, Language, Dialect Change, Literacy, Child Development, Latent Growth Analysis

Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) is a person-centered statistical approach that identifies homogenous subgroups within a heterogeneous sample population. It is useful for detecting individual and subgroup patterns of growth or change. Theories and research on children’s language development have been dominated by variable-centered analysis methods such as multiple regression and SEM, and few studies have adopted growth mixture techniques such as LPA. This paper provides an overview of LPA and its application to longitudinal data of language and reading development in 200 African American (AA) children in low-income communities (School Readiness Research Consortium, NICHD 2005-12).

LPA revealed four coherent and distinctive subgroups regarding children’s dialect change between preschool and first grade. Combined with ANOVAs and regression, LPA adds insight into understanding the reading achievement gap and bi-dialectal development in AA and White children. The current study demonstrates that LPA is an effective technique to determine classes of individuals who share similar developmental trajectories and the extent to which these patterns may relate to other variables of interest.