Abstract
This study explores the contribution of nonverbal working memory and processing speed on bilingual children’s morphosyntactic knowledge, after controlling for language exposure. Participants include 307 Spanish–English bilinguals in Kindergarten, second, and fourth grade (mean age = 7;8, SD = 18 months). Morphosyntactic knowledge in English and Spanish was measured using two separate language tasks: a cloze task and a narrative language task. In a series of four hierarchical linear regressions predicting cloze and narrative performance in English and Spanish, we evaluate the proportion of variance explained after adding (a) English exposure, (b) processing speed and working memory, and (c) interaction terms to the model. The results reveal the differential contribution of nonverbal cognitive skills across English and Spanish. Cognition was not significantly related to performance on either grammatical cloze or narrative tasks in Spanish. Narrative tasks in English were significantly predicted by processing speed, after controlling for age and exposure. Grammatical cloze tasks in English posed an additional cognitive demand on working memory. The findings suggest that cognitive demands vary for bilinguals based on the language of assessment and the task.
Highlights
Cognition is intricately linked to bilingual development and to language development more broadly (Barac and Bialystok 2012)
Our study asks: What is the nature of the relationship between nonverbal cognition and morphosyntactic knowledge, and how does this relationship change across languages and tasks?
Of the 360 children who originally participated in the study, children were excluded from this study if they were missing language exposure data (n = 44), missing data on the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) (n = 8), missing morphosyntax cloze and/or Test of Narrative Language in English (TNL) data (English n = 1; Spanish n = 53)
Summary
Cognition is intricately linked to bilingual development and to language development more broadly (Barac and Bialystok 2012). Young Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States often begin to learn a second language while their first language is still being acquired, which can lead to highly variable performance across the L1 and L2 (Sagarra and Herschensohn 2010) For many of these bilinguals in the U.S, L2 English learning occurs within the context of an immersive L2 environment, in either an early education or elementary school setting Oppenheim et al 2020). Academic language is characterized by decontextualized discourse, and by longer, more complex morphosyntactic structures (e.g., subordinate clauses) as compared to the more social and routinized discourse of the home language or English used in the wider community (Valdés 2004). For these learners, their first L2 exposure is different in terms of both language as well as discourse type
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