Contingent conversations build more than language: How communicative interactions in toddlerhood relate to preschool executive function skills

Abstract

High-quality communicative interactions between caregivers and children provide a foundation for children's social and cognitive skills. Although most studies examining these types of interactions focus on child language outcomes, this paper takes another tack. It examines whether communicative, dyadic interactions might also relate to child executive function (EF) skills and whether child language might mediate this relation.Using a subset of data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, dyadic interactions between 2-year-olds and their mothers were coded for three behaviors: symbol-infused joint engagement, routines and rituals, and fluency and connectedness. Child language was assessed at age 3 and three facets of EF (selfregulation, sustained attention, and verbal working memory) were assessed at age 4.5.Structural equation modeling showed that dyadic interaction related to later child sustained attention and verbal working memory, indirectly through child language and directly related with child self-regulation. This suggests that communicative interactions with caregivers that include both verbal and non-verbal elements relate to child EF, in part through child language. Our findings have implications for the role of caregiver interactions in the development of language and cognitive skills more broadly.

Conversation disruptions in early childhood predict executive functioning development: A longitudinal study

“…These findings add to the growing literature on the role of early adult‐child conversational interaction in shaping EF and psychological development (Gómez & Strasser, 2021; King et al., 2021; Masek et al., 2021, 2022; Salmon et al., 2016), which largely reports that more frequent adult‐child turn‐taking predicts better EF and socioemotional skills. Notably, instead of focusing purely on the frequency of conversational turns, we focused on temporal contingency and temporal disruption as a proportion of total utterances.…”

“…Development of EF in childhood is supported by scaffolding and learning involvement from caregivers (Bernier et al, 2010;Bibok et al, 2009;Merz et al, 2017). Specifically, contingent conversation with caregivers supports early EF development both directly and indirectly through children's language skills (Masek et al, 2021(Masek et al, , 2022. While the direct mechanism is unclear, it is possible that the temporal contingency of turn-taking requires inhibiting one's response until the prior speaker has finished their turn, while the semantic contingency requires cognitive flexibility to keep up with changing topics throughout a conversation (e.g., Merz et al, 2017;Raver, 1996).…”