Prediction of Early Childhood Negative Emotionality and Inhibition From Maternal Distress During Pregnancy

The association was investigated between psychological distress reported during each trimester of pregnancy and maternal ratings of temperament when the children were 6 months and 5 years of age. Mothers in the greater Helsinki area who were to give birth during a 1-year period completed a brief questionnaire describing their psychological adjustment and medical symptoms at each prenatal visit to government health clinics. Mothers rated their children\u27s temperament at ages 6 months and 5 years. Maternal psychological distress during pregnancy was only modestly associated with infant temperament. However, maternal distress during the first trimester was associated with ratings of negative emotionality at age 5 years, with a stronger correlation for males. Inhibition at age 5 was predicted by infant distress to novelty, particularly for males

Foreign Language Learning and SAT Verbal Scores Revisited

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between foreign language learning and verbal ability in English as measured by the verbal section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Reasoning Test. Comparing foreign language students to nonforeign language students in this study, the effect of taking a foreign language on SAT verbal performance differed depending on how a student scored on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) verbal subtest. Students with lower PSAT verbal scores had the greatest benefit from taking a foreign language, while students with higher PSAT verbal scores had smaller benefits. At the same time, within the range of possible PSAT verbal scores, students who took a foreign language outperformed students who did not. When the focus was on the language taken and the highest level attained by the end of junior year; the main effects for both foreign language taken and highest level were statistically significant though their partial eta squared measures suggested they had relatively low effect sizes. Pail-wise comparisons indicated that outcomes for students taking Spanish were somewhat less than those for students taking Latin and German, and that students who took level III of their foreign language by the end of their junior year outperformed those who reached only levels I or II