Inhibitory control plays an important role in children’s cognitive and socioemotional development, including their psychopathology. It has been established that contextual factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) and parents’ psychopathology are associated with children’s inhibitory control. However, the relations between the neural correlates of inhibitory control and contextual factors have been rarely examined in longitudinal studies. In the present study, we used both event-related potential (ERP) components and time-frequency measures of inhibitory control to evaluate the neural pathways between contextual factors, including prenatal SES and maternal psychopathology, and children’s behavioral and emotional problems in a large sample of children (N = 560; 51.75% females; Mage = 7.13 years; Rangeage = 4–11 years). Results showed that theta power, which was positively predicted by prenatal SES and was negatively related to children’s externalizing problems, mediated the longitudinal and negative relation between them. ERP amplitudes and latencies did not mediate the longitudinal association between prenatal risk factors (i.e., prenatal SES and maternal psychopathology) and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Our findings increase our understanding of the neural pathways linking early risk factors to children’s psychopathology.

The deleterious effects of adversity are likely intergenerational, such that one generation’s adverse experiences can affect the next. Epidemiological studies link maternal adversity to offspring depression and anxiety, possibly via transmission mechanisms that influence offspring fronto-limbic connectivity. However, studies have not thoroughly disassociated postnatal exposure effects nor considered the role of offspring sex. We utilized infant neuroimaging to test the hypothesis that maternal childhood maltreatment (CM) would be associated with increased fronto-limbic connectivity in infancy and tested brain-behavior associations in childhood. Ninety-two dyads participated (32 mothers with CM, 60 without; 52 infant females, 40 infant males). Women reported on their experiences of CM and non-sedated sleeping infants underwent MRIs at 2.44 ± 2.74 weeks. Brain volumes were estimated via structural MRI and white matter structural connectivity (fiber counts) via diffusion MRI with probabilistic tractography. A subset of parents (n = 36) reported on children’s behaviors at age 5.17 ± 1.73 years. Males in the maltreatment group demonstrated greater intra-hemispheric fronto-limbic connectivity (b = 0.96, p= 0.008, [95%CI 0.25, 1.66]), no differences emerged for females. Fronto-limbic connectivity was related to somatic complaints in childhood only for males (r = 0.673, p = 0.006). Our findings suggest that CM could have intergenerational associations to offspring brain development, yet mechanistic studies are needed.

Past studies have reported memory differences between monolingual and bilingual infants (Brito & Barr, 2012; Singh, Fu, Rahman, Hameed, Sanmugam, Agarwal, Jiang, Chong, Meaney & Rifkin-Graboi, 2015). A common critique within the bilingualism literature is the absence of socioeconomic indicators and/or a lack of socioeconomic diversity among participants. Previous research has demonstrated robust bilingual differences in memory generalization from 6- to 24-months of age. The goal of the current study was to examine if these findings would replicate in a sample of 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds (N = 92). Results indicate no differences between language groups on working memory or cued recall, but significant differences for memory generalization, with bilingual infants outperforming monolingual infants regardless of socioeconomic status (SES). These findings replicate and extend results from past studies (Brito & Barr, 2012; Brito, Sebastián-Gallés & Barr, 2015) and suggest possible differential learning patterns dependent on linguistic experience.

Canonical syllables may be important units in early speech perception as well as production. Twenty infants (mean age 51 hours) (and twenty controls) were tested for their ability to discriminate between members of syllable pairs which were either canonical (pæt and tæp) or non-canonical (pst and tsp). A discrimination learning method was used in which syllables signalled the availability of either a recording of the mother's voice or silence – one of which was presented if the infant began a sucking burst. Infants in the canonical condition changed sucking patterns during signals over an 18-minute experimental session and activated their mother's voice more than silence, consistent with previous experiments using mother's voice as a reinforcer. In the non-canonical condition, infants also changed sucking patterns but sucked more during the signal for quiet than mother's voice, contrary to previous findings. Differential sucking during the syllables indicated discrimination in both conditions, but infants responded differently depending upon whether the syllables were canonical or non-canonical. The activation of silence in the non-canonical condition may be the result of a preference for quiet, but it is better explained as a failure to progress to a level of differential responding that was reached by the canonical group.