ABSTRACT
Socioeconomic status (SES) is an aggregate measure intended to capture social standing, estimated by identifying an individual's income, educational attainment, and job status. This chapter considers the multiple pathways through which family SES may impact central nervous system development. The association of parental SES with broad aspects of child and adult outcomes has driven researchers to attempt to identify mechanisms by which social experience in childhood could shift developmental trajectories. Initial investigations of the link between exposure to low SES in childhood and neurocognitive function focused on measuring more specific features of cognitive functions than are assessed in achievement tests. Children from low–SES environments are, on average, exposed to a decreased volume and complexity of home language use and decreased exposure to other forms of cognitive enrichment such as reading books. Increased family language complexity is associated with increased efficiency of prefrontal cortex recruitment for the child on a nonlinguistic executive-functioning task.
