# Hablame Bebe: Improving health information access for low-income Hispanic children's early language environments

> **NIH NIH G08** · FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $154,235

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
 Hispanic infants whose families live in poverty are at a significantly elevated risk of poorer cognitive
development and academic achievement. Research shows that this is explained in part by their early language
environment: children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) homes often experience less high-quality
language input than children from higher SES homes, which in turn may lead to delays or gaps in later
language skills. Unfortunately, these circumstances can be worse for Hispanic children whose immigrant
caregivers believe that they should switch from Spanish to English as a result of assimilation pressure or
misinformed advice. Additionally, Hispanics parents are more than twice as likely to have low health literacy
and significantly less likely to attend well-child care check-ups.
 In response to this disparity, our interdisciplinary team created Háblame Bebé, the first mobile phone
application that reduces the word gap and promotes Spanish-English bilingualism for low-income Hispanic
children. In 2017, Háblame Bebé was selected as the winner of the U.S. HRSA Bridging the Word Gap
Challenge. For this Challenge, we developed two prototypes and tested them with 32 low-income Hispanic
families. In this study, we learned that although our app was effective in improving overall outcomes for
children, parents who had experienced linguistic racism were not as likely to give “Language Nutrition” to their
babies in their native Spanish. Only after we created a sociolinguistic pride component in the app did it lead to
caregivers providing significantly more “Language Nutrition” to their children.
 Based on our team’s research on the impact of Háblame Bebé, we need to make additions to the app
in order to maximize outreach and effectiveness for low-income, low-literacy Hispanic caregivers. The
proposed project seeks to serve this high-risk group by developing, disseminating, and evaluating
health information pertaining to early developmental milestones and language environments for low-
income Hispanic families. We have partnered with a health sciences librarian as well as the Miami-Dade
County Public Library System, and together, will do this by: (Aim 1) improving the deliverability, usability, and
understandability of early child development information to low-SES Hispanic families; (Aim 2) developing
additional educational content targeting low health literacy and cultural representation; and (Aim 3) assessing
the effectiveness of the Háblame Bebé phone app using quantitative and qualitative analyses.
 Our goal is to design the most impactful evidence-based app intervention to eliminate the word gap in
low-income Hispanic children in the United States and to deliver better, culturally relevant, and usable health
information to low-income Hispanic families to reduce disparities in their children. The new content developed
will assist in making the Háblame Bebé phone app ready for clinical trial testing upon conclusion of the pr...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9982425
- **Project number:** 5G08LM013183-02
- **Recipient organization:** FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Melissa L Baralt
- **Activity code:** G08 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $154,235
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-08-01 → 2022-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9982425

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9982425, Hablame Bebe: Improving health information access for low-income Hispanic children's early language environments (5G08LM013183-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9982425. Licensed CC0.

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