Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Early childhood home environments are well understood to be foundational for cognitive development, yet their relation-ship to specific cognitive skills is challenging to understand empirically in low resourced nations, leading to lack of clarityabout the roles of socialization versus maturation. We examine the contributions of environmental context on culturallyadapted versions of executive functioning (EF; inhibitory control), expressive language, and reasoning tasks (spatial andrelational reasoning) in a representative sample of 1,834 children (24-59 month-olds) in Nicaragua. Multivariate regres-sions revealed children with highly structured homes and enrollment in early education in this context exhibited higherEF, expressive language and reasoning skills, explaining cognitive skills better than socioeconomic status. These resultssuggest these cognitive skills are malleable and impacted by the home context. Language and reasoning skills were alsorelated to more social partners, suggesting language and reasoning are more tied to social interaction than EF.