关键词: 幼儿, 抑制控制, 发展趋势, 言语理解, 数学认知

Abstract: As one of the core executive functions, inhibitory control is very important to other executive function skills and academic achievement. The most impressive change in inhibitory control occurs during the preschool period. Some studies found that 3~3.75 years was the period in which rapid change would occur. But the tasks of inhibitory control in those studies did not apply to elder preschool children. It was too easy for elder preschool children to reflect their real level. In order to avoid a false conclusion, this study aided a more complex task to explore the developmental tendency of inhibitory control in preschoolers from 3 to 6 years old. And this study also explored the predictive effects of inhibitory control with different levels of complexity on verbal comprehension and mathematical cognition. The experimental design included three factors, which was 2(test time: Time 1, Time 2, the interval of 9 months) ×2(types of task: the day-night task without nested rules, the day-night task with nested rules) ×4(age groups: 3.00~3.75, 3.76~4.50, 4.51~5.25, 5.26~6.00). The first two factors were within-subjects factors, and the third factor was between-subjects factor. One hundred and twenty-two preschoolers aged 3~6 participated in this study and finished all the tests. There were 9-month follow-up tests of inhibitory control and work memory. And the task of work memory was self-ordered pointing task. In the second test time, preschoolers also finished the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Fourth Edition) and Mathematical Cognition Test. The results were as the follows: Firstly, the scores of the day-night task with nested rules were lower than the scores of the day-night task without nested rules in the preschoolers aged 3~6. The inhibitory control based on the day-night task with nested rules was more complex than the inhibitory control based on the day-night task without nested rules. Secondly, in the preschool stage from 3 to 6 years, the less complex inhibitory control increased fast at the beginning and then slowed down, but the more complex inhibitory control kept up a steady increase. There were different developmental tendency for inhibitory control with different levels of complexity. Thirdly, the more complex inhibitory control could independently predict children’s verbal comprehension and mathematical cognition after they got 9 months, but the less complex inhibitory control could not. So, the difficulty of tasks was very important for the study of developmental tendency. The inhibitory control tasks with moderate difficulty could prominently predict preschoolers’ verbal comprehension and mathematical cognition. Implications of these findings for selecting the tests of early developmental studies were discussed.

Key words: preschoolers, inhibitory control, developmental tendency, verbal comprehension, mathematical cognition