Executive Reflection

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DO INDIVIDUALS WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENT EXHIBIT DEFICITS IN EXECUTIVE FUNCTION? A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION ABSTRACT Executive function contributes to reading, writing, mathematics, social competency and learning in general. Children with hearing impairment demonstrate significant gaps in literacy acquisition. The present study investigates the executive functions deficits in adolescents with hearing impairment. Two groups of adolescents with a mean age of 14.6 participated in this cross sectional study. Qualitative analysis of the Verbal Fluency tasks carried out to tap the EF skills in the participants. Cluster number, cluster size and total fluency were measured from the responses obtained. Adolescents in Group II could generate more words…show more content…
Various components of executive functions are reported in the literature. A few of them being organization, planning, set shifting, working memory, impulse regulation etc. These EF skills are important in the development of language, behavioral control and adaptive functioning including academic and social skills (Pisoni et al, 2010). The executive system is associated with the circuits in pre-frontal cortex which has interconnections to the areas of brain associated with motivation, arousal, motor response and which likely provide regulatory control over perceptual coding and attentional functions (Welsh & Pennigton, 1988). The prefrontal system develops over a longer period and continues to mature well into 20’s (Steinberg, 2010). The morphology and functioning of an adolescent brain differs from a child’s brain. During adolescence significant changes occur in the grey and white matter in the prefrontal cortex and furthermore in the structural and functional connectivity between the brain regions (Geers et al,…show more content…
In both semantic and phonological fluency tasks, the participants were asked to generate as many words as possible in one minute. The categories used for semantic fluency task were vehicles, animals, clothes and food. These were chosen owing to the familiarity and paramount of research conducted using these categories as the stimulus. Phonemes /p/& /m/ were used to assess phonological fluency. The experimenter produced the phones rather than producing the letters. Before starting the experiment, practice trial was carried out. The experimenter generated a few words from a semantic category/phonemic category which were not included in this study. The participants were asked to provide further names in the category to check if they understood the task. All the samples were audio recorded using a digital voice recorded for further offline analysis. A stop watch was used to monitor time. Participants were instructed to avoid proper names and its derivatives. Participants were tested individually in a classroom. The entire procedure took 10

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