A relação entre o funcionamento executivo e o desenvolvimento da linguagem aos 24 meses de idade.

Abstract

Executive functions have aroused great interest in research in developmental psychology in recent years. Executive functions have three main cognitive skills, among them, working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. In addition, many studies in the literature have shown the relationship between different components of language and executive development. Thus, the present study aims to investigate the association between language development and executive functions in children aged 24 months. For this, thirty-nine Brazilian children (16 girls) with typical development participated in the present study. On average, three assessment sessions were carried out with the child, lasting approximately 60 minutes each. The children were submitted to the Bayley Baby and Toddler Development Scales - Third Edition (Bayley, 2018), in addition to two executive function tasks - Stroop form (Poulin-Dubois, Blaye, Coutya & Bialystok, 2011) and A-not-B with invisible displacement (Diamond, Prevor, Callender & Druin, 1997). In addition, the child's parents or guardians answered a brief socioeconomic questionnaire (ABEP, 2018) and the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory - Words and Sentences (CDI) (Teixeira, 2000). The results indicated that the participants in the present study had, on average, average performance on the cognitive scale according to Bayley standards. The same occurred on Bayley's receptive and expressive language scales. In addition, no child had a score below -1 SD below the average on the cognitive scale. However, the same did not happen for the receptive and expressive language scales. Correlation analyzes suggested that the child's expressive language assessed by Bayley's expressive language scale correlated significantly with the A-not-B task with invisible displacement (r = 0.37). On the other hand, the child's expressive vocabulary assessed by the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory - Words and Sentences (CDI) and the child's receptive language assessed by the Bayley receptive language scale correlated significantly with the Stroop-form task (r = 0.46 and 0.55, respectively). Together, our results were consistent with the results of other studies found in the literature and show some consistency with the hypothesis of Vygotsky and Luria (1994) that language contributes for the child to create mental tools that help in adaptation of behavior, thoughts and emotions, in situations that require cognitive skills, such as planning or decision making.