Abstract
Previous research has shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing cognitive control. Bilinguals’ enhanced cognitive control is thought to be caused by the necessity to exert more language control in bilingual compared to monolingual settings. Surprisingly, between-group research of cognitive effects of bilingualism is hardly ever combined with within-group research that investigates relationships between language control and cognitive control. The present study compared 27 monolingual Dutch and 27 bilingual Turkish-Dutch children matched on age and fluid intelligence on their performance in a nonverbal switching task. Within the group of bilinguals, the relationship between nonverbal switching and language switching was examined. The results revealed no between-group differences on nonverbal switching. Within the bilingual sample, response times in the language switching and nonverbal switching tasks were related, although no relationships were found between accuracy, switching cost and mixing cost on both tasks. The results support the hypothesis that children utilize domain-general cognitive control in language switching, but this relationship does not entail that bilinguals have better cognitive control than monolinguals.
Highlights
An important aspect of growing up bilingually is learning to control one’s languages
The current study investigated if Turkish-Dutch bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers on nonverbal switching, and if language switching and nonverbal switching are related to each other within the sample of Turkish-Dutch bilingual children
Starting with the second relationship, we found that response times on language switching and response times on nonverbal task-switching were significantly related: children who are better at switching between Turkish and Dutch are better at switching in a nonverbal task in which they have to switch between a shape and color sorting rule
Summary
An important aspect of growing up bilingually is learning to control one’s languages. Other children grow up in dual-language contexts in which both languages are used in the same environments, but typically with different speakers (Green and Abutalebi, 2013), as in bilingual families characterized by a one-parent-one-language pattern In such a situation, children suppress one of their languages while interacting with one parent and suppress their other language when they interact with their other parent (Verhagen et al, 2017). Dutch language use was measured as frequency with which a child was addressed in Dutch in the home environment This information was collected for the mother, father, other caregivers and siblings on a five-point scale ranging from 0 = never to 4 = always. The frequency of language use in the home environment was calculated for each language
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