Nonverbal Attention Deficits in Children With Poor Language Abilities
Open Access
- Author:
- Kubler, Alexanna Kassy
- Area of Honors:
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Dr. Elina Mainela Arnold, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Elina Mainela Arnold, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Carol Anne Miller, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- nonverbal attention
language abilities - Abstract:
- This study examined the link between language abilities and nonverbal attention, or inhibition, in school-age children. The participants in our research consisted of 13 children, 8 males and 5 females from ages 6-14. Several standardized tests were administered to gauge each child¡¯s language abilities; in particular, vocabulary. These tests included the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals ¨C Fourth Edition (CELF-4), Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). These scores were then correlated with a measure of each child¡¯s nonverbal attention (inhibition), using a version of the Flanker task, which was designed by Eriksen & Eriksen in 1974 to examine how well attention is regulated; or how easily an individual is able to focus on an object while other stimuli surround or flank that object. The current study utilized a child-friendly version of the Flanker task, the Attention Networks Task (ANT), developed by Rueda et al in 2004. Measures of accuracy and response latencies were gathered for each participant, and were later used to calculate interference effects for each variable. We hypothesized that children with lower vocabulary scores would demonstrate longer reaction times and less accurate responses during the task, implicating a stronger ¨Dinterference effect¡¬ in those participants. Such results may suggest that children with poor language abilities have difficulties with inhibition as result of a limited working memory capacity and/or speed of processing. From our results we were able to conclude that although response accuracy does not serve as a reliable indicator of the interference effect, PPVT standard scores correlated significantly with the interference effect measured in reaction times, suggesting a relation between nonverbal attention and receptive language.