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)...

Recent years have seen the advent and proliferation of the use of implicit techniques to study learning and cognition. One such application is the use of event-related potentials (ERPs) to assess receptive vocabulary knowledge. Other implicit assessment techniques that may be well-suited to other testing situations or to use with varied participant groups have not been used as widely to study receptive vocabulary knowledge. We sought to develop additional implicit techniques to study receptive vocabulary knowledge that could augment the knowledge gained from the use of the ERP technique. Specifically, we used a simple forced-choice paradigm to assess receptive vocabulary knowledge in normal adult participants using eye movement monitoring (EM) and pupillometry. In the same group of participants, we also used an N400 semantic incongruity ERP paradigm to assess their knowledge of two groups of words: those expected to be known to the participants (high-frequency, familiar words) and those expected to be unknown (low-frequency, unfamiliar words). All three measures showed reliable differences between the known and unknown words. EM and pupillometry thus may provide insight into receptive vocabulary knowledge similar to that from ERPs. The development of additional implicit assessment techniques may increase the feasibility of receptive vocabulary testing across a wider range of participant groups and testing situations, and may make the conduct of such testing more accessible to a wider range of researchers, clinicians, and educators.

BackgroundBoth children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to have difficulties with grammatical processing. A comparison of these two populations with neurodevelopmental disorders was undertaken to examine similarities and differences in the mechanisms that may underlie grammatical processing. Research has shown that working memory (WM) is recruited during grammatical processing. The goal of this study was to examine morphosyntactic processing on a grammatical judgment task in children who varied in clinical diagnosis and language abilities and to assess the extent to which performance is predicted by nonverbal working memory (WM). Two theoretical perspectives were evaluated relative to performance on the grammatical judgment task—the “working memory” account and the “wrap-up” account. These accounts make contrasting predictions about the detection of grammatical errors occurring early versus late in the sentence.MethodsParticipants were 84 school-age children with SLI (n = 21), ASD (n = 27), and typical development (TD, n = 36). Performance was analyzed based on diagnostic group as well as language status (normal language, NL, n = 54, and language impairment, LI, n = 30). A grammatical judgment task was used in which the position of the error in the sentence (early versus late) was manipulated. A visual WM task (N-back) was administered and the ability of WM to predict morphosyntactic processing was assessed.ResultsGroups differed significantly in their sensitivity to grammatical errors (TD > SLI and NL > LI) but did not differ in nonverbal WM. Overall, children in all groups were more sensitive and quicker at detecting errors occurring late in the sentence than early in the sentence. Nonverbal WM predicted morphosyntactic processing across groups, but the specific profile of association between WM and early versus late error detection was reversed for children with and without language impairment.ConclusionsFindings primarily support a “wrap up” account whereby the accumulating sentence context for errors positioned late in the sentence (rather than early) appeared to facilitate morphosyntactic processing. Although none of the groups displayed deficits in visual WM, individual differences in these nonverbal WM resources predicted proficiency in morphosyntactic processing.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11689-017-9209-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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