Article I
Background
It is known that socioeconomic status (SES) impacts both structural and functional brain development in childhood, but before this study, it was never tested how early the signs of impact could be detected. The earliest study of impact tested sixteen to thirty-six-month-old infants in their language and cognitive skills and predicted their language improvement for the next three years (Gou, Choudhury, & Benasich, 2011). Another study observed the effects of low SES by looking at five-year-olds and the lower hemispheric specialization of their frontal gyrus (Raizada, Richards, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 2008). The main factors of SES include the family income, education, occupation, and social class. This study notes that …show more content…
Method of Data Collection The authors studied forty-five infants, which included thirty-one females and fourteen males. The infants were primarily white (Twenty-seven of the participants). Five were African, four were Asian, and nine identified as mixed or other. The infants were laid in their mother’s laps while hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) which measured their brain waves as they viewed pictures of toys and human faces. The participants were from three East London boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Hackney, & Newham). All of these towns are considered to have a lack of resources, but participants had a wide range of income. Participants were found through community centers and day care centers. Eight infants who displayed fussy temperaments and infants with medical conditions, pregnancy complications, or premature birth (< 36 weeks) were excluded from the study (Tomalski, et al., …show more content…
Betancourt, Brodsky, and Hurt focus on socioeconomic related factors such as parent-child interaction, parental education, reading, and the number of words heard by age three years old. The researchers evaluated these influences during the infants’ transitional stage which takes place before they begin speaking. The researchers believed it was necessary to study these influences to gain more understanding of how SES affects an infant’s development. This study was done after article I’s study; hence why article I refers to itself as being the only known study about the effects of SES on infants. This study reduces the age to seven months old and focuses on female infants. The authors of this study recorded evaluating other researcher’s studies, including one that showed children, at the age of twenty-two months, who belonged to families with private insurance, who scored around one deviation higher than children from Medicaid-type insurance of the Language Composite score of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Wild, Betancourt, Brodsky, & Hurt, 2013). Another study the authors’ reviewed provided evidence that high SES was associated with higher quality of maternal speech in the home (Hoff, 2002). Lastly, the researchers looked at another study - one which greatly influenced their hypotheses for their own experiment.
Background
It is known that socioeconomic status (SES) impacts both structural and functional brain development in childhood, but before this study, it was never tested how early the signs of impact could be detected. The earliest study of impact tested sixteen to thirty-six-month-old infants in their language and cognitive skills and predicted their language improvement for the next three years (Gou, Choudhury, & Benasich, 2011). Another study observed the effects of low SES by looking at five-year-olds and the lower hemispheric specialization of their frontal gyrus (Raizada, Richards, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 2008). The main factors of SES include the family income, education, occupation, and social class. This study notes that …show more content…
Method of Data Collection The authors studied forty-five infants, which included thirty-one females and fourteen males. The infants were primarily white (Twenty-seven of the participants). Five were African, four were Asian, and nine identified as mixed or other. The infants were laid in their mother’s laps while hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) which measured their brain waves as they viewed pictures of toys and human faces. The participants were from three East London boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Hackney, & Newham). All of these towns are considered to have a lack of resources, but participants had a wide range of income. Participants were found through community centers and day care centers. Eight infants who displayed fussy temperaments and infants with medical conditions, pregnancy complications, or premature birth (< 36 weeks) were excluded from the study (Tomalski, et al., …show more content…
Betancourt, Brodsky, and Hurt focus on socioeconomic related factors such as parent-child interaction, parental education, reading, and the number of words heard by age three years old. The researchers evaluated these influences during the infants’ transitional stage which takes place before they begin speaking. The researchers believed it was necessary to study these influences to gain more understanding of how SES affects an infant’s development. This study was done after article I’s study; hence why article I refers to itself as being the only known study about the effects of SES on infants. This study reduces the age to seven months old and focuses on female infants. The authors of this study recorded evaluating other researcher’s studies, including one that showed children, at the age of twenty-two months, who belonged to families with private insurance, who scored around one deviation higher than children from Medicaid-type insurance of the Language Composite score of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Wild, Betancourt, Brodsky, & Hurt, 2013). Another study the authors’ reviewed provided evidence that high SES was associated with higher quality of maternal speech in the home (Hoff, 2002). Lastly, the researchers looked at another study - one which greatly influenced their hypotheses for their own experiment.