Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Woodard, Kristina; Pozzan, Lucia; Trueswell, John C.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2015.08.005

Cited by 101 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…We found that inhibition (but not shifting or updating) was a reliable predictor of syntactic performance, even after accounting for age, SES, and IQ. Our finding with respect to the inhibition-syntax relationship is consistent with previous studies that showed an association between inhibition and syntactic comprehension abilities (Choi & Trueswell, 2010;Mazuka et al, 2009;Novick et al, 2005;Woodard et al, 2016). It is notable that prior studies have also identified relationships between syntactic performance and updating (Moser et al, 2007;Roberts et al, 2007), whereas we did not.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Previous studies that have documented a connection between inhibition and syntactic abilities have typically targeted a specific syntactic process such as the ability to recover from garden path sentences (e.g., Mazuka et al, 2009;Novick et al, 2005;Woodard et al, 2016). This process requires one to resolve syntactic ambiguity and thus shares task demands with inhibitory control tasks that also require one to resolve ambiguity in the input.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is evidence to suggest that language and EF abilities also interact in typical populations (e.g., Choi & Trueswell, 2010;Mazuka, Jincho, & Onishi, 2009;Moser, Fridriksson, & Healy, 2007;Slevc, 2011;Woodard, Pozzan, & Trueswell, 2016). For instance, inhibition skills have been implicated in the resolution of lexical and syntactic ambiguity in children (ages 7-10 years) and young adults (Khanna & Boland, 2010).…”

Section: Ef and Language Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is possible, and even likely, that different aspects of language processing (and/or different language-processing tasks) are associated with distinct EF skills. For instance, in the work on syntactic processing, the ability to recover from garden path sentences has been linked with inhibition/shifting (Mazuka et al, 2009;Novick et al, 2005;Woodard et al, 2016), while the ability to identify errors in sentences (Gangopadhyay, Davidson, Ellis Weismer, & Kaushanskaya, 2016) and the ability to integrate a word into the broader sentence structure (Roberts et al, 2007) have been linked with updating. However, because the vast majority of prior work focusing on language-EF relationships targeted a single EF task and a single language task, there remains the question regarding the specificity and the generality of the language-EF relationships.…”

Section: Ef and Language Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The Relationship Between Executive Functions and Language Abilities in Children: A Latent Variables Approach

Kaushanskaya

Park

Gangopadhyay

et al. 2017

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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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)...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ef and Language Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ef and Language Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Relationship Between Executive Functions and Language Abilities in Children: A Latent Variables Approach

Kaushanskaya

Park

Gangopadhyay

et al. 2017

J Speech Lang Hear Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Since it is assumed that linguistic representations compete during both comprehension and production, it should not be surprising that IDs in EFs predict many aspects of language processing. For example, they predict performance on recovery from garden-path sentences in both adults [96,97] and children [98]; interference from locally coherent but globally inappropriate lexical items during sentence processing [99]; pragmatic comprehension and production [100]; lexical ambiguity resolution in children [101]; and interference across languages in bilingual speakers [102].…”

Section: Relationships Between Linguistic and Cognitive Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%