Executive function correlates of pragmatic language in children with ADHD
Description
This study tested the hypotheses that Arabic-speaking children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) would perform more poorly than typically developing children on pragmatic-language and executive-function measures, and that working memory, inhibition, and attention would explain individual differences in pragmatic-language performance after controlling for diagnostic group, age, gender, and IQ. The dataset contains participant-level quantitative data from 57 native Arabic-speaking children aged 10–13.08 years recruited from seven public schools in Cairo: 25 children diagnosed with ADHD according to DSM-5 criteria and 32 typically developing children. The variables include diagnostic group, age, gender, IQ, four culturally appropriate pragmatic-language measures—understanding implied meanings, imagination and nonverbal expression, pragmatic judgement, and narrative description—as well as measures of verbal and visuospatial working memory, the central executive, episodic-buffer functioning, inhibition using Stroop and Go/No-Go tasks, and attention using visual-search and continuous-performance tasks. Higher accuracy and composite scores generally indicate better performance; variable definitions, score ranges, coding conventions, and any exceptions concerning errors or response times should be interpreted using the accompanying data dictionary. The data show that the ADHD group performed significantly below the typically developing group on all four pragmatic-language measures, with medium-to-large effect sizes, and on most executive-function measures, although the groups did not differ significantly in episodic-buffer performance. In the final hierarchical regression model, all predictors together explained 50.9% of the variance in pragmatic language, while inhibition and working memory were the only significant independent predictors; attention did not explain additional variance after the other variables were controlled. The dataset can be used to reproduce the reported descriptive statistics, group comparisons, principal component analyses, correlations, and hierarchical regression, as well as to conduct secondary analyses of relationships among pragmatic language, executive functions, and ADHD. Because the study is cross-sectional and based on a culturally specific sample, the findings should be interpreted as evidence of associations rather than causal mechanisms.
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Data were collected in a cross-sectional, school-based study conducted in seven public schools in Cairo, Egypt. Participants were 57 native Arabic-speaking children aged 10–13 years, including 25 children with ADHD diagnosed by neurologists or psychiatrists according to DSM-5 criteria and 32 typically developing controls. The ADHD diagnosis was supported by school reports and parent/teacher information; parents confirmed that children with ADHD had not taken medication for at least 24 hours before testing. After parental written consent and child assent were obtained, the first author individually administered all measures at school in two approximately 45-minute sessions. The assessment battery included the Egyptian adaptation of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition, abbreviated battery; computerized visual-search and Continuous Performance Task measures of attention; working-memory tasks assessing verbal, visuospatial, central-executive, and episodic-buffer functions; computerized Stroop and Go/No-Go tasks measuring inhibition; and culturally appropriate Arabic pragmatic-language tasks assessing inference, nonverbal expression, pragmatic judgement, and narrative description. Raw task scores were recorded for each participant, then analysed using group comparisons, principal component analysis to create pragmatic-language and executive-function composite scores, Pearson correlations, and hierarchical multiple regression.