Pay attention to Executive Functions in language acquisition research: the engagement of child participants depends on them

Abstract

In this squib, we present a brief summary on Executive Functions (FEs), a group of cognitive abilities that allow us to identify problems, establish goals and action plans towards solutions. We focused on their development in children and on how the lack of such functions might interfere in children’s engagement in linguistic experiments. Since, from the point of view of the child-participant, experiments do not have immediate purpose and do not favor their immediate well-being, children often lose interest and fail to engage in experimental tasks. Experiments might turn into boring activities to children whose FEs have not yet developed. As an alternative to mitigate these problems, we proposed that experimenters should consider the quality and ecological validity of experiments, thus avoiding large data loss, through playfulness and repetition of tasks especially concerning online experiments. To illustrate our suggestion, we report two alternative experiments that involve roleplaying tasks, which successfully engaged participants, incurring in minimal data loss.

Keywords

• funções executivas, participantes infantis, role-paying, aquisição de linguagem.