Abstract
Many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing executive functioning, but other studies have not revealed any effect of bilingualism. In this study we compared three groups of bilingual children in the Netherlands, aged 6–7 years, with a monolingual control group. We were specifically interested in testing whether the bilingual cognitive advantage is modulated by the sociolinguistic context of language use. All three bilingual groups were exposed to a minority language besides the nation’s dominant language (Dutch). Two bilingual groups were exposed to a regional language (Frisian, Limburgish), and a third bilingual group was exposed to a migrant language (Polish). All children participated in two working memory tasks (verbal, visuospatial) and two attention tasks (selective attention, interference suppression). Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on selective attention. The cognitive effect of bilingualism was most clearly present in the Frisian-Dutch group and in a subgroup of migrant children who were relatively proficient in Polish. The effect was less robust in the Limburgish-Dutch sample. Investigation of the response patterns of the flanker test, testing interference suppression, suggested that bilingual children more often show an effect of response competition than the monolingual children, demonstrating that bilingual children attend to different aspects of the task than monolingual children. No bilingualism effects emerged for verbal and visuospatial working memory.
Highlights
Over the past few years many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks measuring executive functions
In order to control for level of Dutch, which was the language of instruction, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) scores were included as a covariate as well
The three bilingual groups differed in sociolinguistic setting: two of the bilingual groups were exposed to a regional language (Frisian, Limburgish) in addition to the nation’s dominant language (Dutch), and the third bilingual group consisted of children exposed to a migrant language (Polish) besides Dutch
Summary
Over the past few years many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks measuring executive functions (for reviews, see Adesope et al, 2010; Barac and Bialystok, 2011; Hilchey and Klein, 2011). Bilinguals are thought to develop executive function advantages because they manage multiple languages and continuously monitor the appropriate language for each communicative interaction (Costa et al, 2009). They need to attend to cues that inform the speaker on which language to use, select the right language, and choose appropriate lexicalisation, and while doing this they suppress the interference of other languages. Interactions in bilingual contexts may call upon general conflict-monitoring and goal-orienting abilities (Colzato et al, 2008; Costa et al, 2009; Hernández et al, 2013), leading to general executive function advantages (see Bialystok et al, 2012, for an overview)
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