Prospective memory (PM) is vital for children to live independently. Theoretical and empirical evidence has shown that executive function (EF) plays an important role in children's PM. However, there is no EF training for the PM of school-age children. Therefore, a 4-week EF training programme was conducted in this study to investigate the…

Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

This study examined whether executive functions impact how flexibly children represent task context in performing repeated sequential actions. Japanese children in Experiments 1 (N = 52; 3-6 years) and 2 (N = 50, 4-6 years) performed sequential actions repeatedly; one group received reminders. Experiment 1 indicated that reminders promote flexible…

Executive functions (EFs) in early childhood are predictors of later developmental outcomes and school readiness. Much of the research on EFs and their psychosocial correlates has been conducted in high-income, minority world countries, which represent a small and biased portion of children globally. The aim of this study is to examine EFs among…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

The lack of research exploring the influence of dynamic visual narratives on inference skills prompted the present study with an aim to profile the inference skills in school children between the ages of 6 years and 9 years 11 months using dynamic visual narratives. A total of 80 participants were considered for the study. An animated story was…

Studies of switching between tasks and studies of error commission have both provided solid behavioral measures of executive control. Nonetheless, a gap remains between these strands of research. In three experiments we sought to reduce this gap by assessing the impact of task errors on N-2 repetition costs, an effect supposedly related to…

This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children's narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual…

Purpose: While the involvement of attention in utterance planning is well established at the conceptual and lexical levels, the attentional demands of postlexical processes are still debated. This study investigates the involvement of attentional resources on motor speech encoding during utterance production in the context of Parkinson's disease…

The study explores the effects of a hybrid instructional approach combining Situated Learning (SL) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) on the executive functions and cognitive abilities of fourth-grade students learning English as a second language (ESL). Method: An experimental design was employed, with students divided into control and…

The aim of this study is twofold: To examine if deafness is invariably associated with deficits in executive function (EF) and to investigate the relationship between sign language proficiency and EF in deaf children of deaf parents with early exposure to a sign language. It is also the first study of EF in children acquiring Polish Sign Language.…

Cultural background can influence cognition, including executive functions (EFs), abilities that encompass skills responsible for self-regulation of thoughts and behavior. The seminal unity and diversity model of EFs proposes the existence, in adulthood, of at least three correlated but separable EF latent (shared variance in more than one…

The present study compared bilingualism with bidialectalism in their respective impact on executive control, using a short-term language switching training paradigm for participants who were both bidialectals (Shanghainese-Mandarin Chinese) and bilinguals (Chinese-English). Twenty participants were assigned to a control group where no language…

Purpose: This study investigated whether maximum speech performance, more specifically, the ability to rapidly alternate between similar syllables during speech production, is associated with executive control abilities in a nonclinical young adult population. Method: Seventy-eight young adult participants completed two speech tasks, both…