The Relationship between Social Skills, Executive Functions, and Story Comprehension in Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

Objectives: This study aimed to compare and examine the correlation between the social skills (problem solving, emotional expression, sense of order, and confidence), executive function (updating, inhibition, and shifting), and story comprehension ability of children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Also, this study investigated if social skills and executive function predict the performance in the story comprehension task in each group. Methods: A total of 33 children (14 children with SLI and 19 TD children) aged 4 to 7 years participated in this study. Parents assessed their children's social skills using the Korean-Social Skill Rating Scale for Preschoolers (K-SSRSP). Children performed the tasks of executive function and story comprehension. Results: Children with SLI received significantly lower scores than TD children on the K-SSRSP. Also, children with SLI performed significantly lower than TD children in inhibition, shifting and story comprehension tasks. In TD children, there was a positive correlation between story comprehension ability and updating ability. In children with SLI, story comprehension ability was positively correlated with problem solving and emotional expression. Moreover, in TD children, updating ability significantly predicted their story comprehension ability. On the other hand, in children with SLI, the factors predicting their story comprehension ability were found to be problem solving and emotional expression among social skills. Conclusion: These results present the necessity to look into the social skills when evaluating and intervening with children with SLI or when advising non-experts such as parents or caregivers.