Abstract
Recent research has increasingly questioned the bilingual advantage for executive functions (EF). We used structural equation modeling in a large sample of Turkish immigrant and German monolingual children (N = 337; aged 5–15 years) to test associations between bilingualism and EF. Our data showed no significant group differences between Turkish immigrant and German children’s EF skills while taking into account maternal education, child gender, age, and working memory (i.e., digit span backwards). Moreover, neither Turkish immigrant children’s proficiency in either language nor their home language environment predicted EF. Our findings offer important new evidence in light of the ongoing debate about the existence of a bilingual advantage for EF.
Highlights
The ability to speak two or more languages fluently offers its speakers manifold advantages such as communicative and intercultural benefits
We aimed to address the shortcomings of previous studies by employing sophisticated structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses in a large sample of Turkish immigrant children in Germany and a control group of monolingual German children to test associations between bilingualism and executive functions (EF)
Parental education was not related to EF abilities and was removed from the model for reasons of parsimony and statistical fit
Summary
The ability to speak two or more languages fluently offers its speakers manifold advantages such as communicative and intercultural benefits. Research has claimed cognitive advantages for bilingual over monolingual speakers, the reported benefit including higher levels of executive control in non-linguistic tasks [1, 2]. The research of Peal and Lambert [4] was a turning point providing evidence in favor of a bilingual advantage. It was Bialystok et al.’s [1] article that sparked a surge of research focused on determining the extent and conditions of a potential bilingual advantage for executive functions. Replication studies [5, 6], as well as original research [7,8,9] refuting the claim of bilingual advantages on executive functions have become frequent
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