Executive Function, Working Memory, Perceptual-Motor Skills, and Speech Perception in Normal-Hearing Children: Some Preliminary Findings

Speech perception involves a number of complex cognitive processes. Previous work has suggested that executive function, working memory, and perceptualmotor skills play a role in children’s language development. In order to further investigate this relationship, we evaluated the correlations between perception of degraded speech, which represents an approximation of the auditory signal received by a cochlear implant user, with several tasks involving executive function, working memory, and sensory-motor function. Our data revealed that age and performance on two tasks, one representing executive function and one representing perceptual-motor skills, were significantly correlated with children’s perception of highly degraded speech. Moreover, correlations between each of these tasks and the perception of degraded speech remained strong and significant even when the effects of age were partialled out. These results suggest that processes attributed to executive function, such as attention, planning, motor control, hand-eye coordination, and problem solving, underlie spoken language processing and its development. The present findings with normal-hearing, typicallydeveloping children provide an initial benchmark for more detailed investigation of individual differences in performance and audiologic outcome among profoundly deaf children who use cochlear implants.