Abstract
Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt thoughts and behaviors to new environments. Previous studies investigating cognitive flexibility in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) present contradictory findings. In the current study, cognitive flexibility was assessed in 5- and 6-year-old preschoolers with DLD (n = 23) and peers with typical development (TD; n = 50) using a nonexistent object drawing (NEOD) task. The children were asked to draw a nonexistent man and a nonexistent house. The children with DLD did not differ from their peers with TD on simple category changes, which were comprised of changes in the size or shape of parts of the object, change of the whole shape of the object, and deletion of parts of the object. Nevertheless, children with DLD made fewer more complex, high-level category changes, which included same-category insertions, position exchange of object's parts, and cross-category insertions. The difference between DLD and TD on high-level category changes was related to differences between the two groups in verbal short-term memory and inhibition. Furthermore, children with DLD made no changes to their original drawings of an existing man and house more often than their peers with TD. It is concluded that children with DLD aged 5–6 years show less flexibility on the NEOD task than age-matched children with TD. This difference in cognitive flexibility may be related to lower levels of verbal short-term memory and inhibition ability of children with DLD, or to different use of these cognitive skills on the NEOD task.
Highlights
Children often need to adapt their thoughts and behaviors to changing situations in their everyday life
We considered four additional factors in our analyses in order to explore the robustness of the differences between typical development (TD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) on the nonexistent object drawing (NEOD) task: basic drawing skills, nonverbal intelligence, verbal short-term memory and inhibition
The weaker cognitive flexibility of children with DLD, signaled by a higher likelihood to make no changes and a lower likelihood to make high-level changes, is in line with the findings reported by Farrant et al (2012) who found that 5-year-old children with DLD performed lower than age-matched peers with TD on a Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task, which tests cognitive flexibility
Summary
Children often need to adapt their thoughts and behaviors to changing situations in their everyday life. In order to do this, they need cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility comprises one of the executive functions (Miyake & Friedman, 2012; Miyake et al, 2000). Executive functions are a set of general-purpose control processes that regulate a person’s thoughts and behaviors and include inhi bition and updating of the working memory contents, in addition to cognitive flexibility. Deficits in cognitive flexibility have been associated with several neurodevelopmental disorders, including Developmental Language Disorder Received 26 March 2020; Received in revised form 19 May 2021; Accepted 5 June 2021.
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