nChildren's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or…

Parental socioeconomic status (SES) is a well-established predictor of children's neurocognitive development. Several theories propose that specific cognitive skills are particularly vulnerable. However, this can be challenging to test, because cognitive assessments are not pure measures of distinct neurocognitive processes, and scores across…

There is evidence showing that both maturational and environmental factors can impact on later language development. On the one hand, preterm birth has been found to increase the risk of deficits in the preschool and school years. Preterm children show poorer auditory discrimination, reading difficulties, poor vocabulary, less complex expressive…

The widely and internationally replicated socioeconomic status (SES) gradient of executive function (EF) implies that intervention approaches may do well to extrapolate conditions and practices from contexts that generate better child outcomes (in this case, higher SES circumstances) and translate these to contexts with comparatively poorer…

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is related to disparities in the development of both language and executive functioning (EF) skills. Emerging evidence suggests that language development may precede and provide necessary scaffolding for EF development in early childhood. The present preregistered study investigates how these skills co-develop…

We studied the role of sensorimotor and working memory systems in supporting development of perceptual rhythm processing with 119 participants aged 7-12 years. Children were assessed for their abilities in sensorimotor synchronization (SMS; beat tapping), auditory working memory (AWM; digit span), and rhythm discrimination (RD; same/different…

Infants undergo fundamental shifts in perception that are reported to be critical for language acquisition. In particular, infants' perception of native and non-native sounds begins to align with the properties of their native sound system. Thus far, empirical evidence for this transition--perceptual narrowing--has drawn from socio-economically…

Although there is substantial evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) predicts children's executive function (EF), the mechanisms underlying this association are poorly understood. This study tested the utility of two theories proposed to link SES to children's EF: the family stress model and the family investment model. Data came from the…

It is well attested that high socio-economic status (SES) is associated with larger vocabulary size estimates in young children. This has led to growing interest in identifying associations and mechanisms that may contribute to this relationship. In this study, parent-child reading behaviors were investigated in relation to vocabulary size in a…

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…

Low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with greater risk for symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One mechanism through which SES may confer risk for ADHD is by influencing brain structure. Alterations to cortical thickness, surface area and subcortical volume have been associated with low SES and with the presence of…

For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have challenged the size or even existence of this gap. The present study is a…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been repeatedly linked to the developmental trajectory of vocabulary acquisition in young children. However, the nature of this relationship remains underspecified. In particular, despite an extensive literature documenting young children's reliance on a host of skills and strategies to learn new words, little…

In this study (n = 1000, M[subscript age at K1entry] = 53.4 months, SD = 3.4; 53% females), we investigated the contributions of the family socioeconomic status (SES; maternal education and an income-related measure) and number and age of siblings to the development of children's math, reading, and working memory (WM) updating skills over the…

An individual's socioeconomic status (SES) is often viewed as a proxy for a host of environmental influences. SES disparities have been linked to variance in brain structures particularly the hippocampus, a neural substrate of learning and memory. However, it is unclear whether the association between SES and hippocampal volume is similar in…