Links between language and executive functions in Swedish preschool children: A pilot study

Abstract

Language skills and executive functions (EF) undergo rapid development during preschool years and are foundational for a wide range of life outcomes but little is known of the connections between language and EF in Swedish, typically developing children. The current pilot study included 47 mono- and multilingual children aged 4–6 and aimed at describing the relationship between language and EF and investigating potential associations to age, sex, bi-/multilingualism, socioeconomic status (SES), and aspects of preschool attendance. Measures of language and EF correlated with one another to a large extent, but also showed some differentiation, suggesting a specific link between morphosyntactic ability and inhibition. Age was a significant predictor of most but not all measures. No significant effects of sex were found, with the exception for a female advantage in nonverbal communicative behavior, assessed by a novel rating paradigm. SES did not predict language or EF, and bi- and/or multilingual children did not differ from monolingual Swedish children on language or EF measures. Findings are discussed in relation to the connection between language and EF as well as to the needs of development of reliable language, EF, and communication measures for use in the Swedish context.

Selective Auditory Attention Associated With Language Skills but Not With Executive Functions in Swedish Preschoolers

“…Kaushanskaya et al (2017) showed that non-verbal inhibition predicted school-aged children's syntactic abilities. For Swedish preschool-aged children, Tonér and Nilsson Gerholm (2021), found concurrent associations between measures of inhibition and morphosyntactic accuracy. Woodard et al (2016) showed that inhibition plays a role in young children's interpretation of ambiguous sentences.…”

“…However, Duñabeitia et al (2014) conducted a large-scale study with school-aged children and adolescents and found no support for a bilingual advantage. A small Swedish study did not find any differences in EFs between monolingual and multilingual children (Tonér and Nilsson Gerholm, 2021) and a metaanalysis has indicated that cognitive advantages related to bi-/multilingualism may be a result of publication bias (de Bruin et al, 2014). With regard to possible differences between girls and boys in language skills, previous results are diverging.…”

“…Calvo and Bialystok (2014) showed in a sample of Canadian children that bilingual children performed lower than monolingual children on language tasks in the majority language also when taking SES into account. However, a small Swedish study indicated that there were no significant differences in language skills when comparing monolingual and bi-/multilingual children (Tonér and Nilsson Gerholm, 2021). Bi-or multilingual children have often been reported in the literature to perform better with regard to EFs than monolinguals (e.g., Adesope et al, 2010;Calvo and Bialystok, 2014;Barac et al, 2016).…”

“…All behavioral testing was audio-and video recorded to enable multimodal annotation and to double-check examiners' adherence to protocol. The tasks were presented in a predetermined order to provide sufficient variation for the participants and to control session duration, based on a pilot study (Tonér and Nilsson Gerholm, 2021). The order of presentation for the first session was DCCS, Test of Emotion Comprehension (not further reported here), BST, a math task (not further reported here) and HTKS.…”

“…Information score concerns the information density in the retell and that children include relevant content, correct sequencing of those events and provide appropriate amount of context; a scoring guide for Swedish is provided in the test manual. In addition, we extracted a measure of text length, counted as number of unified predicates (e.g., Berman, 1988), and a measure of morphosyntactic accuracy, an often-used measure in first as well as second language acquisition (e.g., Zwitserlood et al, 2015;Meir, 2018), here operationalized as the proportion of morphosyntactically well-formed utterances (see also Tonér and Nilsson Gerholm, 2021, for results regarding Swedish children).…”