The Connection between Executive Functions and Syntax Development in 8-Year-Old Children

This article considers how children’s neuropsychological development, in particular executive functions, influences their speech acquisition. The study involved 71 students of the second grade (average age 8.8 years, standard deviation 0.29) in one of the lyceums in Moscow. The children were asked to do tasks based on a battery of neuropsychological methods, including making up a story using a series of pictures “Garbage”. The results of the neuropsychological tests were used to calculate the following parameters: firstly, the index of the executive functions (3.1) and the index of serial organization (3.2); secondly, the auditory information processing index (2.2) and the left hemispheric index (L); and, thirdly, the visuospatial information processing index (2.4) and the right hemispheric index (R). According to these indices, strong and weak groups were formed 1) for executive functions, 2) for left hemisphere, and 3) for right hemisphere functions. The stories created by the children were used to analyze their speech production ability, as well as both general textual and syntactic parameters. The data obtained revealed that, depending on the level of development of executive functions, children’s stories differ in a number of parameters. The latter include general text features (semantic completeness, semantic adequacy (the presence of incompleteness and distortions), the construction of the semantic program of the story, the number of words in the story) and syntactic and grammatical features (the number of simple and complex sentences, the average sentence length, etc.).