What causes the word gap? Financial concerns may systematically suppress child-directed speech

Parents with fewer educational and economic resources (low socioeconomic-status, SES) tend to speak less to their children, with consequences for children’s later life outcomes. Despite this well-established and highly popularized link, surprisingly little research addresses why the SES “word gap” exists. Moreover, existing research focuses on individual-level explanations with little attention to structural constraints with which parents must contend. In two pre-registered studies, we test whether experiencing financial scarcity itself can suppress caregivers’ speech to their children. Study 1 suggests that caregivers who are prompted to reflect on scarcity—particularly those who reflect on financial scarcity—speak to their 3-year-olds less than a control group in a subsequent play session. Study 2 finds that caregivers speak less to their children at the end of the month—when they are more likely to be experiencing financial hardship—than the rest of the month. Thus, above and beyond the individual characteristics of parents, structural constraints may affect how much parents speak to their children

Response to Flournoy (2021): Reflections on the benefits and challenges of communicating the results of a pre-registered study

In 2020, we posted a preprint online presenting the results of two pre-registered studies, now published in revised form (Ellwood-Lowe et al., 2021; original preprint archived at https://osf.io/ktsdp/). While undergoing the journal review process, circulation of this preprint encouraged open feedback from peers, including a thoughtful comment on our studies and pre-registration best practices by Dr. John Flournoy (Flournoy, 2021). Here we respond to the points raised in Flournoy’s comments, and discuss the benefits and challenges of pre-registering “high-risk” studies, particularly as early career researchers. We begin by reflecting on our scientific process between the first pre-registration and the ultimate dissemination of results—pulling back a curtain to reveal a piece of the research process that is often occluded. Next, we address Flournoy’s comments directly and explain how they were helpful in shaping the final version of our paper. Finally, we make suggestions for pre-registered studies in the future

What causes the word gap? Financial concerns may systematically suppress child-directed speech

Parents with fewer educational and economic resources (low socioeconomic-status, SES) tend to speak less to their children, with consequences for children’s later life outcomes. Despite this well-established and highly popularized link, less research addresses why the SES “word gap” exists. Moreover, while research has assessed individual-level contributors to the word gap—like differences in parenting knowledge—we know little about how structural constraints that vary according to SES might affect caregivers’ speech. In two pre-registered studies, we test whether experiencing financial scarcity can suppress caregivers’ speech to their children. Study 1 suggests that higher-SES caregivers who are prompted to reflect on scarcity—particularly those who reflect on financial scarcity—speak less to their 3-year-olds in a subsequent play session, relative to a control group. Study 2 suggests that mid- to higher-SES caregivers engage in fewer back-and-forth exchanges with their children at the end of the month—when they are more likely to be experiencing financial hardship—than the rest of the month. These studies provide preliminary evidence that—above and beyond caregivers’ individual characteristics—structural constraints may affect how much parents speak to their children

Brain network coupling associated with cognitive performance varies as a function of a child's environment in the ABCD study.

Prior research indicates that lower resting-state functional coupling between two brain networks, lateral frontoparietal network (LFPN) and default mode network (DMN), relates to cognitive test performance, for children and adults. However, most of the research that led to this conclusion has been conducted with non-representative samples of individuals from higher-income backgrounds, and so further studies including participants from a broader range of socioeconomic backgrounds are required. Here, in a pre-registered study, we analyzed resting-state fMRI from 6839 children ages 9-10 years from the ABCD dataset. For children from households defined as being above poverty (family of 4 with income > 25,000, or family of 5+ with income > 35,000), we replicated prior findings; that is, we found that better performance on cognitive tests correlated with weaker LFPN-DMN coupling. For children from households defined as being in poverty, the direction of association was reversed, on average: better performance was instead directionally related to stronger LFPN-DMN connectivity, though there was considerable variability. Among children in households below poverty, the direction of this association was predicted in part by features of their environments, such as school type and parent-reported neighborhood safety. These results highlight the importance of including representative samples in studies of child cognitive development

Indian = Hindu? The Development of Nationalist Attitudes among Hindu and Muslim Children in India

Many political movements across the world today define citizenship in exclusionary ethnic or religious terms. The present study extends research on ethnic-national associations in adults to children, adding to the relatively sparse literature on the development of national associations in children and in non-western contexts. Explicit and implicit religious-national associations were examined in a sample of 160 9- to 16-year-olds (79 Hindu; 81 Muslim) in Gujarat, India. Results suggest that while Hindu children show a strong Indian = Hindu association by age 9, Muslim children appear to be buffered from this association. Further, this association uniquely predicts variance in children’s attitudes about social policy and their concept of nationality, above and beyond their age, religion, and intergroup attitudes

The application of neuroimaging to social inequity and language disparity: A cautionary examination

In the nascent field of the cognitive neuroscience of socioeconomic status (SES), researchers are using neuroimaging to examine how growing up in poverty affects children’s neurocognitive development, particularly their language abilities. In this review we highlight difficulties inherent in the frequent use of reverse inference to interpret SES-related abnormalities in brain regions that support language. While there is growing evidence suggesting that SES moderates children’s developing brain structure and function, no studies to date have elucidated explicitly how these neural findings are related to variations in children’s language abilities, or precisely what it is about SES that underlies or contributes to these differences. This issue is complicated by the fact that SES is confounded with such linguistic factors as cultural language use, first language, and bilingualism. Thus, SES-associated differences in brain regions that support language may not necessarily indicate differences in neurocognitive abilities. In this review we consider the multidimensionality of SES, discuss studies that have found SES-related differences in structure and function in brain regions that support language, and suggest future directions for studies in the area of cognitive neuroscience of SES that are less reliant on reverse inference. Keywords: Socioeconomic status (SES), Neuroimaging, Reverse inference, Language, Development, Childhood povert

Children’s Use of Pragmatic Inference to Learn About the Social World

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