Exposure to high levels of early life stress have been associated with long-term difficulties in learning, behavior, and health, with particular impact evident in the language domain. While some have proposed that the increased stress of living in a low-income household mediates observed associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and child outcomes, considerable individual differences have been observed. The extent to which specific variables associated with socioeconomic status – in particular exposure to stressful life events – influence the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying language acquisition are not well understood. Auditory statistical learning, or the ability to segment a continuous auditory stream based on its statistical properties, develops during early infancy and is one mechanism thought to underlie language learning. The present study used an event-related potential (ERP) paradigm to test whether maternal stress, adjusting for socioeconomic variables (e.g., family income, maternal education) was associated with neurocognitive processes underlying statistical learning in a sample of 26-month-old children (n = 23) from predominantly low- to middle-income backgrounds. Event-related potentials were recorded while children listened to a continuous stream of tri-tone “words” in which tone elements varied in transitional probability. “Tone-words” were presented in random order, such that Tone 1 always predicted Tones 2 and 3 (transitional probability for Tone 3 = 1.0), but Tone 1 appeared randomly. A larger P2 amplitude was observed in response to Tone 3 compared to Tone 1, demonstrating that children implicitly tracked differences in transitional probabilities during passive listening. Maternal reports of stress at 26 months, adjusting for SES, were negatively associated with difference in P2 amplitude between Tones 1 and 3. These findings suggest that maternal stress, within a low-SES context, is associated with the manner in which children process statistical properties of auditory input.

暴露于早期生活压力的高水平与学习、行为和健康方面的长期困难有关，尤其是在语言领域。虽然有人提出生活在低收入家庭的压力增加介导了观察到的社会经济地位 (SES) 和儿童结果之间的关联，但已经观察到相当大的个体差异。与社会经济地位相关的特定变量——尤其是生活压力事件的暴露——影响语言习得的神经认知机制的程度尚不清楚。听觉统计学习，或根据其统计特性分割连续听觉流的能力，在婴儿早期发展，是一种被认为是语言学习基础的机制。n = 23) 主要来自中低收入背景。当孩子们听一连串三音“词”时，记录事件相关电位，其中音调元素的转换概率不同。“声调词”以随机顺序呈现，使得声调 1 始终预测声调 2 和 3（声调 3 的过渡概率 = 1.0），但声调 1 随机出现。与音调 1 相比，响应音调 3 时观察到更大的 P2 振幅，表明儿童在被动聆听期间隐含地跟踪了转换概率的差异。母亲在 26 个月时报告的压力，调整了 SES，与音调 1 和音调 3 之间 P2 振幅的差异呈负相关。这些发现表明，在低 SES 背景下，母亲的压力，