The Relationship Between Executive Function And Ambiguous Sentence Comprehension In 3-5 Graders

Ambiguous sentence comprehension involves the processing of individual characterization of speech,semantics,sentence grammar,syntax,and so on.It is a very complex cognitive process.To understand ambiguous sentences,the individual needs to produce multiple symptoms and flexible processing,then according to different situations to suppress irrelevant meaning,choose the appropriate meaning to understand,which is closely related to the individual’s Executive Function.The purpose of this study was to explore the developmental characteristics of ambiguous sentence comprehension among students from grade 3-5,and the relationship between Executive Function and ambiguous sentence comprehension.There are two studies in this paper.The first study is a questionnaire study.A total of 426 primary school students from grade 3-5 were enrolled in this study.The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function Brief was used to measure their Executive Function.Use the method of right and wrong judgment to investigate their ambiguous sentence comprehension ability.To understand the developmental characteristics of ambiguous sentence comprehension and the relationship between Executive Function and ambiguous sentence comprehension of primary school students.The second study is an experimental study.With 59 fifth graders as participants,using ambiguous sentence comprehension test,color word Stroop task,1-Back task,task switch paradigm and semantic-syntactic cognitive flexibility to explore the relationship between Executive Function and ambiguous sentence comprehension.The results show that:(1)There are differences between the understanding ability of ambiguous sentences in grader 3-5,the higher the grade,the stronger the understanding ability of ambiguous sentences.(2)After controlling age and gender,the Executive Function of Grade3-5 students is significantly positively related to the ambiguous sentences comprehension.(3)After controlling gender,general intelligence,decoding,vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness,it was found that cognitive flexibility of the fifth graders in general and in reading were both significantly positively related to ambiguous sentence understanding,and can positively predict ambiguous sentence comprehension.(4)The semantic-syntactic cognitive flexibility of fifth graders was an independent predictor of ambiguous sentence understanding.This indicates that ambiguous sentence comprehension is closely related to the Execution Function.