Does Inattention and Hyperactivity Moderate the Relation Between Speed of Processing and Language Skills?

Abstract

The causal role of speed of processing (SOP) in developmental language disorder (DLD) is unclear given that SOP has been implicated in other neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This study investigated associations between SOP, language, and inattention/hyperactivity in a U.K. epidemiological cohort (N = 528). Monolingual children from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds were assessed longitudinally; at ages 5–6 (2012/2013) and 7–8 years (2014/2015). Persistent weaknesses in SOP characterized children with DLD but did not predict language longitudinally. Ratings of inattention/hyperactivity moderated the association between SOP and language, indicating that SOP deficits are particularly detrimental for language when coupled with poor attention/hyperactivity. SOP may be a shared risk factor for DLD and inattention/hyperactivity or a general marker of neurodevelopmental disorder.

Sources of variability in the prospective relation of language to social, emotional, and behavior problem symptoms: Implications for developmental language disorder.

“…Inverse probability weighting is often utilized in large longitudinal studies to yield population representative samples by calculating weights that account for selective participation and adjusting them for inevitable nonresponse in subsequent waves. Likewise, inverse probability weighting is utilized in SCALES, as detailed elsewhere (Gooch et al, 2019; Vamvakas et al, 2019). In brief, weights were constructed as the inverse of the probability of inclusion in the study from a logistic regression model fit to the entire screened population of 6,459 monolingual children attending mainstream schools; this model estimated the probability of inclusion for in-depth assessment at Year 1, with predictor variables including sex, season of birth, and scores on the Children’s Communication Checklist—Short.…”

The Relationships Among Temporal Processing, Rapid Naming, and Oral Reading Fluency in Chinese Children With and Without Dyslexia

“…Processing speed has been declared the most vital mechanism underlying temporal processing (Benasich & Tallal, 1996) and is considered a vigorous psychometric factor in people's daily life (Gooch et al, 2019). In other cognitive and linguistic tasks, the rate at which auditory information is processed and the rate at which the pronunciation of a stimulus is retrieved from memory (i.e., rapid naming) are greatly influenced by the underlying mechanism of processing speed (Kail et al, 1999;Kail & Hall, 1994).…”

Anxiety and Reading Comprehension of Chinese Children with and without Reading Disabilities: The Role of Processing Speed

“…Research supports the view that children who have deficits in linguistic and reading tasks (e.g., reading disabilities) may show deficits in different domains of processing speed, including motor or nonmotor domains (Gooch et al, 2019). Such processing speed deficits have been proven to influence a wide range of reading performance and cognitive and reading-related abilities (for a review, see Johnson et al, 2010).…”