Poster #63 - From Terrible Twos to Sassy Sixes: The Development of Early Childhood Vocabulary and Executive Functioning

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Across early childhood, rapid growth in children’s word comprehension and production (i.e., vocabulary; Fenson et al., 1994) is accompanied by maturation of the cognitive processes that underlie effortful, goal-oriented behavior (i.e., executive functioning (EF); Diamond, 2013). Previous research suggests that children’s vocabulary and EF skills are correlated in early childhood (Kuhn et al., 2014) and predictive of critical academic/social outcomes later in development (Blair & Razza, 2007; Moll et al., 2015). Understanding the developmental trajectory of these foundational and interrelated processes has the potential to assist in the identification of at-risk child populations and inform early intervention. And yet, much of the existing longitudinal research is limited by its focus on unidirectional relations among preschool child samples. Our study sought to address these limitations by examining whether children’s vocabulary and EF abilities are bidirectionally related over time across four measurement waves starting in toddlerhood and extending up to the elementary school years.
In this longitudinal study (N = 356, 49% girls), vocabulary and EF were measured when children were 2, 3, 4, and 6 years of age (Table 1). Vocabulary size was assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (age 2; Fenson et al., 2007) or the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (ages 3, 4, 6; Dunn & Dunn, 2007). A battery of age-appropriate, behavioral EF tasks was also administered, which included the Tongue Task (age 2; Kochanska et al., 2000), Crayon Delay (age 2; Calkins, 1997), DCCS (ages 2, 3, 4, 6; Zelazo et al., 1996), Day Night (age 3; Gerstadt et al., 1994), Digit Span (ages 3, 4, and 6; Blankenship et al., 2019), Gift Peek (Kochanska et al., 2000; age 4), and Number Stroop (age 6; Ruffman et al., 2001). For each participant, a composite EF value was generated at each measurement wave. Autoregressive, cross-lagged panel modeling was conducted in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2017) using full information maximum likelihood.
After controlling for child sex and maternal education, the best-fitting panel model was a unidirectional model whereby children’s early vocabulary scores predicted their EF performance at the following timepoint (χ2(20) = 56.12, p < 0.001; RMSEA = 0.07 (90% CI = 0.05 – 0.09); CFI = .93; Figure 1). Although age 2 EF predicted age 3 vocabulary size in the initial model, this association was no longer significant after accounting for maternal education status (a proxy for familial access to resources). Our results illustrate that early vocabulary size plays an important role in predicting children’s later EF performance across multiple developmental timepoints in early childhood, even after controlling for children’s initial EF scores. These findings have important implications for intervention research as fostering early vocabulary acquisition may serve as a possible avenue for improving EF outcomes in young children.

Authors

• Madeleine Diane Bruce, University of Utah
  Presenting Author

• Jyoti Savla, Virginia Tech

• Martha Ann Bell, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University