Children with stronger executive functioning and fewer ADHD traits produce more effective referential statements

•Nine–12-year-old children participated in communication and executive function tasks.•Executive function performance, particularly working memory, related to communication ability.•Working memory accounted for variance in the relations between ADHD symptoms and communication.•Results support theoretical frameworks of communication difficulties for children with ADHD.

Successful communication requires that speakers provide enough information for conversational partners to accurately determine their intended meaning. A community-based sample of 9–12-year-old children (N = 54) participated in two communication tasks assessing their ability to adequately describe target objects to a listener, as well as executive functioning tasks, while the parents rated their children’s ADHD traits. Children’s executive functioning performance on tasks of working memory and inhibitory control related to their ability to provide sufficient detail in their referential statements. Greater ADHD symptomatology was related to a failure to provide essential information that disambiguated target objects from distractors in one communication task and to the provision of more irrelevant information in another. Working memory capacity was found to account for variance in the relations between children’s ADHD traits and performance on referential communicative tasks. Results support recent frameworks that posit that the communicative challenges for children with increased ADHD traits are attributable to executive functioning weaknesses.