Maternal Education and Cognitive Processing at Three Months as Shown by the Infants' Vocal Response to Mother vs. Stranger

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to examine whether infants of high education mothers show higher cognitive processing than infants of lower education mothers at age three months. Cognitive processing was assessed by the infants' differential vocal responsiveness (DVR) to mother vs. stranger, a behaviour that has been shown to relate to later intelligence. The subjects were 14 infants from highly educated mothers and 21 infants from less educated mothers. When the infants were 3 months old a female experimenter visited them in their home where the mother and the experimenterstranger each talked to the baby for three minutes. The infants' vocalisations were recorded and subsequently an independent coder assigned a DVR score to each infant by subtracting its non-distress vocal output in response to the stranger from its vocal output in response to the mother. Infants of higher education mothers were found to have significantly higher DVR scores than infants of less educated mothers.