A young child’s ability to regulate behavior—a component of executive functioning, the cognitive processes that help with planning, focus, and self-control—is related to how they process and acquire language, according to new research spearheaded by faculty from the George Washington University Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS).

While executive function and language development have long been considered interconnected, there has been limited evidence demonstrating the connection. But a new study authored by Associate Professor Malathi Thothathiri from the CCAS Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, along with researchers from the Max Planck Institute, reveals how executive function assists with language comprehension.

The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.

The team recruited more than 100 Dutch children, ages four and five, and tested their comprehension of active and passive sentences.

Young children often understand active sentences—i.e., “The monkey tickles the horse.” But they may struggle to accurately interpret passive sentences—i.e., “The horse is tickled by the monkey.”

That’s because young children often learn to interpret the first noun in a sentence as the agent that does the acting. With passive sentences, they tend to misinterpret the meaning because they have yet to learn that the first noun in a sentence is something that could be acted upon.

In the study, each child was invited to complete a series of tasks, including ones that measured their executive function. They then completed an online exercise in which they listened to active and passive sentences and selected the picture on the screen that corresponded with each sentence. The researchers recorded their responses and tracked their eye movements.

Among the study’s findings were:

• Children who demonstrated higher levels of executive function were better able to parse passive sentences accurately.
• Children who demonstrated higher levels of executive function also showed better longer-term improvements in comprehending passive sentences, but this relationship was intertwined with children’s overall language ability.

“Our study suggests a virtuous spiral during a child’s development in which executive function can help develop more language skills, which can in turn help develop executive function, and so on,” Thothathiri said.