Maternal Education and Children’s Verbal Analogy: The Sequential Mediating Effect of Receptive Vocabulary and Cognitive Control

Objective: This study aimed to investigate whether the pathway from early maternal education to children’s later verbal analogical reasoning during the transition to primary school could be explained by the developmental relationship between receptive vocabulary and cognitive control. Methods: The study analyzed data of 954 children aged 5-8 years old and their mothers from the 6th (2013, T1), 8th (2015, T2), and 9th (2016, T3) waves of the Panel Study on Korean Children, applying SPSS 27.0 and the PROCESS macro v.4.2 software. Results: The results revealed that maternal education at T1 predicted children’s verbal analogical reasoning skills at T3, and this link was mediated sequentially by children’s receptive vocabulary at T1 and cognitive control at T2. Conclusions: The findings suggest that early maternal education is an important predictor of analogical reasoning skills later in development, and such prediction can be explained, at least in part, by the relationship between receptive vocabulary and cognitive control. The implications were discussed for interventions for mothers with low education level and their young children.