Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, 417 Chapel Drive, 208 Soc-Psych Building, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2012 Mar;44(1):270-86. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0142-4.
The relationship between language development and executive function (EF) in children is not well understood. The Lexical Stroop Sort (LSS) task is a computerized EF task created for the purpose of examining the relationship between school-aged children's oral language development and EF. To validate this new measure, a diverse sample of school-aged children completed standardized oral language assessments, the LSS task, and the widely used Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS; Zelazo, 2006) task. Both EF tasks require children to sort stimuli into categories based on predetermined rules. While the DCCS largely relies on visual stimuli, the LSS employs children's phonological loop to access their semantic knowledge base. Accuracy and reaction times were recorded for both tasks. Children's scores on the LSS task were correlated with their scores on the DCCS task, and a similar pattern of relationships emerged between children's vocabulary and the two EF tasks, thus providing convergent validity for the LSS. However, children's phonological awareness was associated with their scores on the LSS, but not with those on the DCCS. In addition, a mediation model was used to elucidate the predictive relationship between phonological awareness and children's performance on the LSS task, with children's vocabulary fully mediating this relationship. The use of this newly created and validated LSS task with different populations, such as preschoolers and bilinguals, is also discussed.
儿童语言发展与执行功能（EF）之间的关系尚未得到充分理解。词汇 Stroop 分类任务（LSS）是一种计算机化的 EF 任务，旨在研究学龄儿童口语语言发展与 EF 之间的关系。为了验证这种新的测量方法，我们让不同的学龄儿童群体完成了标准化口语语言评估、LSS 任务和广泛使用的维度变化卡片分类任务（DCCS；Zelazo，2006）。这两个 EF 任务都要求儿童根据预定规则将刺激分类。虽然 DCCS 主要依赖视觉刺激，但 LSS 则利用儿童的语音回路来访问他们的语义知识库。这两个任务都记录了准确性和反应时间。LSS 任务的分数与 DCCS 任务的分数相关，词汇量与这两个 EF 任务之间也出现了类似的关系，从而为 LSS 提供了收敛效度。然而，儿童的语音意识与他们在 LSS 上的分数有关，而与 DCCS 上的分数无关。此外，还使用中介模型阐明了语音意识与儿童在 LSS 任务上的表现之间的预测关系，儿童的词汇量完全中介了这种关系。还讨论了在不同人群（如学龄前儿童和双语儿童）中使用新创建和验证的 LSS 任务的问题。
