Longitudinal Predictors of Vocabulary Knowledge in Turkish Children: The Role of Maternal Warmth, Inductive Reasoning, and Children’s Inhibitory Control

Domain‐General Cognitive Ability Predicts Bilingual Children's Receptive Vocabulary in the Majority Language

“…The observation that our bilingual early-school-age participants with more cognitive resources developed larger vocabularies supports previous results (Bohlman et al, 2015;Ekerim & Selçuk, 2018;Slot & Suchodoletz, 2018;Weiland et al, 2014;White et al, 2017) and confirms the relevance of higherorder cognition for language learning (Cowan, 2014;Diamond, 2013). Partial correlations suggested unidirectionality.…”

“…Two others focused on specific measures of inhibition. Investigating monolingual Turkish children, Ekerim and Selçuk (2018) observed that inhibition predicted vocabulary 1 year later whereas found no such effect for either of the languages in a sample of bilingual Spanish-English children. In sum, although it is theoretically expected that domain-general cognitive ability supports children's vocabulary development, empirical data to support or reject this hypothesis are still inconclusive because previous research has shown a variety of outcomes, warranting further research.…”

“…Two others focused on specific measures of inhibition. Investigating monolingual Turkish children, Ekerim and Selçuk () observed that inhibition predicted vocabulary 1 year later whereas Lonigan et al. () found no such effect for either of the languages in a sample of bilingual Spanish–English children.…”

“…Our expectation was that cognitive abilities would predict vocabulary development (Bohlman et al., ; Ekerim & Selçuk, ; Slot & Suchodoletz, ; Weiland et al., ; White et al., ) because attention and working memory facilitate input processing and fast mapping, which are both relevant for learning words. Cross‐lagged analyses could also demonstrate reciprocal relationships showing that verbal ability supports performance in nonverbal cognitive tasks.…”

“…For determining the impact of cognitive ability on language development, longitudinal studies are relevant because these can reveal the temporal ordering of events. Previous longitudinal research focusing on children has shown that cognitive ability predicts language (Ekerim & Selçuk, ; Weiland, Barata, & Yoshikawa, ; White, Alexander, & Greenfield, ) and that language predicts cognitive ability (Fuhs & Day, ; Kuhn, Willoughby, Vernon‐Feagans, Blair, & The Family Life Project Key Investigators, ). Other studies have also observed a bidirectional relationship between language and cognitive ability (Bohlmann, Maier, & Palacios, ; Slot & Suchodoletz, ) or found no relationship between the two (Gooch, Thompson, Nash, Snowling, & Hulme, ; Lonigan, Allan, Goodrich, Farrington, & Phillips, ).…”