Inhibitory Control, Working Memory, and Language Ability in 4-5 year-old Normal Children and Children with Developmental Language Delay

Oh, Kyung-Min; Goo, Sei-Young

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2008;13(2): 263-281.

Kyung-Min Oh^` , and Sei-Young Goo^`

오경민(Kyung-Min Oh)| 구세영(Sei-Young Goo)

ABSTRACT

Backgrounds & Objectives
In this study, inhibitory control, working memory, and language abilities of children with normal development and developmental language delay (DLD) were compared.
Methods
Forty-nine normal children and 22 children with DLD matched for language age participated in this study. For evaluation, the authors employed ‘sun-moon’ and ‘rabbit-lion’ tasks for inhibitory control capacities, ‘eight-boxes’ and ‘backward number counting’ tasks for working memory capacities, and PRES for language abilities.
Results
The 4-year-old disability group showed significantly lower performance in the ‘rabbit-lion' task than the other three groups. The 5-year-old disability group showed significantly higher performance in the ‘backward number counting’ task than the 4-year-old groups with or without disabilities. With regard to correlation between inhibitory control, working memory, and language abilities, a significant correlation was found only between language ability and the ‘rabbit-lion’ and ‘backward number counting’ tasks in the 4-year-old disability group.
Discussion & Conclusion
If children have the language ability of a 5-year-old, then they can perform stable inhibitory control and working memory tasks regardless of their language ability. However, if they have the language ability of a 4-year-old, but with DLD, other disability conditions and variables can influence their task performances.