The Regulatory Function of Language in Bilingual Children

Abstract

The authors investigated the development of the ability of 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old bilingual children to per form a complex perceptual-motor task when they were given only Spanish or English verbal instructions. Results indicated that children perform better when given Spanish instruction. This was especially true of the 5-year-olds. Results also indicated that performance under both languages increased with age, and that a stable system of per ceptual-motor connections was established by verbal instruction under the Spanish treatment at age 6 and under the English treatment at age 7. THE ABILITY to decode verbal instructions and encode them in other forms of behavior, such as perceptual-motor, may be basic to other forms of language behaviors. The purpose of this study was to examine the development of the above mentioned ability in bilingual children. Luria (3, 4) demonstrated that children from ! SY2 to 4% years old regulate their perceptual motor behavior by means of the nonspecific im pulse aspect of language. From the ages of 4^ to 51/2 years, the regulatory function of language is transferred from the nonspecific impulse aspect to the analytic system of specific elective signifi cative connections which are produced by verbal rules. Language begins to play an important role in the establishment of new connections which