Inner Speech and Executive Function in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Implications for Assessment and Intervention.
Lauren S Baron, Yael Arbel
PMID 38957614WHAT IT FOUND
Children with developmental language disorder may struggle to use inner speech to guide their actions.
For them, visual cues like removing target cards often help executive function tasks more than verbal prompts. Assessing their thinking skills requires accounting for this language difference.
Key findings
01In children with developmental language disorder, supporting visual attention by removing task targets improved executive function performance more than verbal mediation strategies.
02When inner speech was prevented through articulatory suppression, children with developmental language disorder showed no drop in problem-solving accuracy, unlike their typically developing peers who relied on inner speech to perform well.
03Children with developmental language disorder spent significantly less time planning on executive function tasks, indicating they used inner speech less than typically developing children, even when baseline accuracy was similar.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The review notes that most studies on inner speech in DLD use problem-solving tasks, which are 'impure' and engage multiple executive functions simultaneously. There is a lack of standardized assessments that account for verbal mediation, making it difficult to separate executive function ability from language ability in clinical settings. Intervention evidence is sparse, with only one study cited examining inner speech training specifically in children with DLD, and the active ingredients of that training remain unclear.
Declared interests
The authors declared no competing financial or nonfinancial interests.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that children with DLD lack executive function capacity based solely on poor performance in verbal tasks. Their difficulty may stem from an inability to use inner speech to mediate the task, not a deficit in the executive function itself.