Culture Post: Study Links Executive Function to Language Skills in Young Children

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

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).

The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.

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.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-links-function-language-skills-young.html

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