Purpose: We aimed to outline the latent variables approach for measuring nonverbal executive function (EF) skills in school-age children, and to examine the relationship between nonverbal EF skills and language performance in this age group. Method: Seventy-one typically developing children, ages 8 through 11, participated in the study. Three EF components, inhibition, updating, and task-shifting, were each indexed using 2 nonverbal tasks. A latent variables approach was used to extract latent scores that represented each EF construct. Children were also administered common standardized language measures. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between EF and language skills.Results: Nonverbal updating was associated with the Receptive Language Index on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition (CELF-4). When composites denoting lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities were derived, nonverbal inhibition (but not shifting or updating) was found to predict children's syntactic abilities. These relationships held when the effects of age, IQ, and socioeconomic status were controlled. Conclusions: The study makes a methodological contribution by explicating a method by which researchers can use the latent variables approach when measuring EF performance in school-age children. The study makes a theoretical and a clinical contribution by suggesting that language performance may be related to domain-general EFs. E xecutive functions (EFs) are a set of top-down cognitive control processes used to manage thought and behavior (Diamond, 2013;Miyake et al., 2000). EFs are crucial to the ability to adapt efficiently to changes in the environment (Huizinga, Dolan, & van der Molen, 2006;Zelazo, Müller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003), and to the ability to manage basic daily tasks, such as planning, decision making, and problem solving (Friedman et al., 2006;Miyake et al., 2000). It is not surprising then that there is a wealth of literature linking EFs and broad quality-of-life outcomes, including academic achievement (e.g., Best, Miller, & Naglieri, 2011;Blair & Razza, 2007) and social-emotional development (Broidy et al., 2003;Ferrier, Bassett, & Denham, 2014) There is a great deal of interest in accurately measuring EF skills in our field, both for the purposes of documenting EF deficits in impaired populations and for the purposes of possibly influencing language outcomes through targeting EF skills. In the present study, we examined EF performance in a sample of monolingual typically developing children, with the following three goals. The first goal was a methodological one: We aimed to document the use of a latent variables approach when measuring nonverbal EF performance in children. The second goal was a clinical one: We aimed to examine whether children's performance on common standardized language measures is associated with EFs. The third goal was a theoretical one: We aimed to examine whether domain-general EF skills (as indexed by performance on nonverbal EF tasks)...
Neonates with this distinctive DWI pattern had a high positive rate of rotavirus infection, without evidence of other pathogens, and were characterized as term newborns with neurologic symptoms arising approximately the fifth day after birth. Although the specificity of this pattern is unclear, rotavirus testing should be considered for neonates presenting with this DWI pattern.
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