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Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns led to sweeping changes in the everyday lives of children and families, including school closures, remote work and learning, and social distancing. To date no study has examined whether these profound changes in young children’s day to day social interactions impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood. To address this question, we compared the performance of two cohorts of 3.5- to 5.5-year-old children tested before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns on several measures of false-belief understanding, a critical social cognition skill that undergoes important developments in this age range. Controlling for age and language skills, children tested after the pandemic demonstrated significantly worse false-belief understanding than those tested before the pandemic, and this difference was larger for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. These results suggest that the pandemic negatively impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood, especially for lower SES children. 

Abstract Socioeconomic status predicts the quantity and nature of child-directed speech that parents produce. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. This study investigated whether the cognitive load imposed by resource scarcity suppresses parent talk by examining time-dependent variation in child-directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample. We predicted that child-directed speech would be lowest at the end of the month when Americans report the greatest financial strain. 166 parents and their 2.5 to 3-year-old children (80 female) participated in a picture-book activity; the number of utterances, word tokens, and word types used by parents were calculated. All three parent language measures were negatively correlated with the date of the month the activity took place, and this relationship did not vary with parental education. These findings suggest that above and beyond individual properties of parents, contextual factors such as financial concerns exert influence on how parents interact with their children. 

Recent research suggests that bilinguals might exhibit advantages in several areas of executive function, including working memory, inhibitory control, and attentional control. However, few studies have examined potential bilingual advantages within lower socioeconomic status (SES) populations. Here we addressed this gap in the literature by investigating whether low-SES Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers exhibited advantages in executive function relative to two monolingual control groups (English, Spanish). Across three experiments, bilingual children exhibited superior performance on two different measures of visual–spatial memory, as well as measures of inhibitory and attentional control. These results suggest that bilinguals exhibit broad advantages in executive function during the preschool years, and these advantages are evident within a disadvantaged, low-SES population.