Behaviour problems in early childhood have a lasting impact on cognitive development and education attainment in later adolescence and into adulthood. Here we address the relationship conduct and hyperactivity problems at school entrance, and vocabulary acquisition in adolescence. We compare performance in identical assessments across two generations of British children born 30 years apart in 1970 (n = 15,676) and 2000/2 (n = 16,628) and find that both conduct and hyperactivity problems have a negative association with later vocabulary in both generations. We take advantage of rich longitudinal birth cohort data and establish that these relationships hold once family socioeconomic status and a child’s personal characteristics and earlier vocabulary acquisition are taken into account. We also find that teenagers today achieved substantively lower scores in the vocabulary assessment compared to their counterparts born 30 years earlier, and that this holds across all categories within each of the family and individual characteristics considered in this article. As vocabulary and language skills are key prerequisites for wider learning, we discuss implications the findings have for education policies.

中文翻译：

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入学时儿童行为问题与青少年词汇习得的关系——英国两代相隔30岁儿童的比较

儿童早期的行为问题对青春期后期和成年期的认知发展和教育程度具有持久影响。在这里，我们解决了入学时的关系行为和多动问题，以及青春期的词汇习得。我们比较了 1970 年 ( n  = 15,676) 和 2000/2 ( n )出生的两代英国儿童在相同评估中的表现= 16,628）并发现行为和多动问题都与两代人后来的词汇量呈负相关。我们利用丰富的纵向出生队列数据，并确定一旦考虑到家庭社会经济地位和孩子的个人特征以及早期词汇习得，这些关系就会成立。我们还发现，与 30 年前出生的同龄人相比，今天的青少年在词汇评估中的得分要低得多，这适用于本文所考虑的每个家庭和个人特征的所有类别。由于词汇和语言技能是更广泛学习的关键先决条件，我们讨论了研究结果对教育政策的影响。