Change Is Hard: Individual Differences in Children’s Lexical Processing and Executive Functions after a Shift in Dimensions

ABSTRACT

Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has demonstrated that EFs support language comprehension when there is conflict between competing, incompatible interpretations of temporarily ambiguous words or phrases. By engaging EFs, children and adults are able to select or bias their attention toward the correct interpretation. However, the degree to which language processing engages EFs in the absence of ambiguity is poorly understood. In the current experiment, we tested whether EFs may be engaged when comprehending speech that does not elicit conflicting interpretations. Different components of EFs were measured using several behavioral tasks and language comprehension was measured using an eye-tracking procedure. Five-year-old children (n = 56) saw pictures of familiar objects and heard sentences identifying the objects using either their names or colors. After a series of objects were identified using one dimension, children were significantly less accurate in fixating target objects that were identified using a second dimension. Further results reveal that this decrease in accuracy does not occur because children struggle to shift between dimensions, but rather because they are unable to predict which dimension will be used. These effects of predictability are related to individual differences in children’s EFs. Taken together, these findings suggest that EFs may be more broadly involved when children comprehend language, even in instances that do not require conflict resolution.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participating families who made this research possible. We also thank Sarah Oakley, Martin Zettersten, Desia Bacon, and all other members of the Infant Learning Lab.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability

All stimuli, data, and analysis scripts are available online at: https://osf.io/vrdm3/

Notes

¹ None of the children were reported to be color-blind by their parents, though we did not use a standardized test to check for color-blindness. All children, however, were very accurate on Color trials in the looking-while-listening task. Children’s mean accuracy in fixating the target image after it was identified by its color (during a critical window 300–1800 ms after the onset of the target word) was 84.9% (SD = 6.5%) and ranged between 68.7% and 99.5%. These data suggest that all children were able to use color to identify the target object.

² Participants were dropped from statistical analyses involving RTs if they did not respond correctly on any trial in one or more conditions.

³ We used the average proportion of 30-month-olds reported to produce each word according to an online database of norms from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (wordbank.standford.edu), which is the oldest age available. A table with all familiar items, their norms, and yoked pairings is included online at: https://osf.io/vrdm3/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under the Grants [R37HD037466, F31HD091969, U54HD090256]; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [F31HD091969,R37HD037466,U54HD090256].