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AbstractStudies from high‐income populations have shown that stimulating, supportive communicative input from parents promote children's cognitive and language development. However, fewer studies have identified specific features of input supporting the healthy development of children growing up in low‐ or middle‐income countries. The current study proposes and tests a multi‐dimensional framework for understanding whether and how caregiver communicative input mediates the associations between socio‐economic conditions and early development. We also examine how caregiver conceptual scaffolding and autonomy support uniquely and synergistically explain variation in child outcomes. Participants were 71 Bangladeshi families with five‐year‐olds who were exposed to a range of biological and psychosocial hazards from birth. Caregiver‐child interactions during snack sharing and semi‐structured play were coded for caregiver conceptual scaffolding, autonomy support, and child engagement. Findings indicate that the two dimensions of input were correlated, suggesting that caregivers who provided richer conceptual scaffolds were simultaneously more supportive of children's autonomy. Notably, conceptual scaffolding and autonomy support each mediated associations between maternal education and child verbal intelligence quotient (IQ) scores. Further, caregivers who supported greater autonomy in their children had children who participated in conversations more actively, and these children in turn had higher performance IQ scores. When considered simultaneously, conceptual scaffolding was associated with verbal IQ over and above autonomy support, whereas autonomy support related to child engagement, controlling for conceptual scaffolding. These findings shed new light on how environmental factors may support early development, contributing to the design of family‐centered, culturally authentic interventions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/9v_8sIv7akoResearch Highlights
Studies from high‐income countries have identified factors mitigating the impacts of socio‐economic risks on development. Such research is scarce in low‐ and middle‐income countries.
The present study conceptualized and evaluated caregiver communicative input in Bangladeshi families along two interrelated yet distinct dimensions: conceptual scaffolding and autonomy support.
Conceptual scaffolding and autonomy support individually mediated associations between maternal education and child verbal IQ, shedding light on protective factors in families living in poverty.
Parents providing richer conceptual scaffolds were simultaneously more supportive of children's autonomy. However, the two dimensions each related to cognition and language through unique pathways.

AbstractThere is strong support for the view that children growing up in low‐income homes typically evince poorer performance on tests of inhibitory control compared to those growing up in higher income homes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the work documenting this association has been conducted in high‐income countries. It is not yet known whether the mechanisms found to mediate this association would generalize to children in low‐ and middle‐income countries, where the risks of exposure to extreme poverty and a wide range of both biological and psychosocial hazards may be greater. We examined relations among early adversity, neural correlates of inhibitory control, and cognitive outcomes in 154 5‐year‐old children living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an area with a high prevalence of poverty. Participants completed a go/no‐go task assessing inhibitory control and their behavioral and event‐related potential responses were assessed. Cortical source analysis was performed. We collected measures of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mental health, psychosocial adversity, and cognitive skills. Supporting studies in high‐income countries, children in this sample exhibited a longer N2 latency and higher P3 amplitude to the no‐go versus go condition. Unexpectedly, children had a more pronounced N2 amplitude during go trials than no‐go trials. The N2 latency was related to their behavioral accuracy on the go/no‐go task. The P3 mean amplitude, behavioral accuracy, and reaction time during the task were all associated with intelligence‐quotient (IQ) scores. Children who experienced higher levels of psychosocial adversity had lower accuracy on the task and lower IQ scores.