Executive Functions as an Interface in Language Development

Abstract

The main objective of the present study is to highlight which verbal tactics are associated with executive skills in the early stages, and how the emergence and anchoring of formal processes and various structures take place in this process. From the theoretical perspective of construction linguistics, which assumes the value of spontaneous verbal usages and the importance of a bottom-up route, the authors consider the acquisition of Spanish, examining in particular the presence and weight of communicative-interactive resources such as signalling, emphasis, maintenance of conversational threads, narrative voices, and temporal and spatial turns. The more specific aim here is to offer early evidence of such tactics, showing both their evolutionary tendency towards conscious and active interaction and their support in genuine semiotic-structural procedures characteristic of emergent grammar. For this purpose, they look at language production drawn from corpora of children's speech.