Examining Potential Mediators of the Relationship Between Developmental Language Disorder and Executive Function Performance in Preschoolers

Group differences in nonverbal IQ and receptive vocabulary can partially explain why children with DLD tend to have lower executive function scores relative to peers with typical language. However, even after accounting for these mediators, there is a significant, large direct effect of DLD status on executive function performance, which suggests that the groups' difference in executive functioning is not fully explained by other variables.