To reach the above objectives, we conducted two behavioural studies. In Study 1, we investigated the relations of EFs and rhythm processing with receptive grammar with traditional cognitive tasks that children completed in one visit. In Study 2, a different cohort of children participated in two visits and completed the same traditional tasks as in Study 1 at one visit and the gamified versions of the same tasks at the other visit (the order of visits was counterbalanced across children). We compared performance on the traditional and gamified versions of the tasks to test the validity of the gamified tasks. We collected data from 6-8-year-old German-speaking children with 89 participants in Study 1 and 31 participants in Study 2 at the University of Potsdam. Children were recruited via the BabyLab Potsdam and via schools, social media, mailing lists in order to recruit a socially diverse sample.
In Study 1, we measured children’s receptive grammar ability, EFs and rhythm processing with traditional primarily computer-based tasks commonly used in this age group. We used sentence-picture matching tasks to assess their grammar ability. From EFs we decided to measure inhibition (i.e. the ability to deliberately inhibit dominant, automatic, or prepotent responses when necessary; measured with a flanker task) and working memory updating (i.e. monitoring incoming information in working memory and replacing old, no longer relevant information with newer, more relevant information; measured with an n-back task) because these subfunctions have been shown to be associated with grammar ability by previous studies. We used a rhythm discrimination task and a synchronization tapping task to measure musical rhythm processing. Additionally, we collected data on potential confounding variables including the child’s short-term memory (digit span task), age, biological sex, parent education, musical and language-literacy environment.
Our results revealed that children’s grammar ability was associated both with their inhibition and rhythm discrimination ability even when we controlled for the other non-linguistic variables of interest and the potential covariates.
