Inhibition in preschool children at risk of developmental language disorder

Abstract

It has been hypothesised that executive function deficits, specifically inhibition difficulties, may play a central role in Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The presented study compared the response inhibition abilities of typically developing preschool children, with monolingual and bilingual preschool children who had already been classed as being at risk of developing DLD. A non-word repetition test and two inhibition tasks were used along with a prospective memory task. The results indicated that children at risk of DLD performed significantly worse than typically developing children on all tasks. The findings suggest that children at risk of DLD are impaired in response inhibition. Educational and therapeutic implications are discussed.