Abstract
The present study examined whether linguistic cognitive control skills were related to non-linguistic cognitive control skills in monolingual children (Study 1) and in bilingual children from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds (Study 2). Linguistic inhibitory control was measured using a grammaticality judgment (GJ) task in which children judged the grammaticality of sentences while ignoring their meaning. Non-linguistic inhibitory control was measured using a flanker task. Study 1, in which we tested monolingual English-speaking children, revealed that better inhibitory control skills, as indexed by the performance on the flanker task, were associated with improved performance on the GJ task. Study 2, in which we tested bilingual English-Spanish speaking children from low SES backgrounds, revealed that better non-linguistic inhibitory control skills did not yield better performance on the GJ task. Together, these findings point to a role of domain-general attention mechanisms in language performance in typically developing monolingual children, but not in bilingual children from low SES. Present results suggest that the relationship between linguistic and domain-general cognitive-control abilities is instantiated differently in bilingual vs. monolingual children, and that language-EF interactions are sensitive to language status and SES.
Highlights
A large body of research suggests that bilingualism may positively impact cognitive control mechanisms (e.g., Bialystok, 1999; Bialystok et al, 2004; Bialystok and Martin, 2004; Kroll et al, 2008; Kovács and Mehler, 2009) and executive functions (EF) in general
We found that our sample of monolingual English-speaking children experienced significant interference from incongruent semantic information when engaging in a grammaticality judgment task
In line with previous studies that have observed a similar result (Bialystok, 1986; Lum and Bavin, 2007), we interpret these findings to suggest that children were required to inhibit the task-irrelevant semantic information in order to attend to the task-relevant grammatical information
Summary
A large body of research suggests that bilingualism may positively impact cognitive control mechanisms (e.g., Bialystok, 1999; Bialystok et al, 2004; Bialystok and Martin, 2004; Kroll et al, 2008; Kovács and Mehler, 2009) and executive functions (EF) in general. Bilingual advantages have been observed in populations spanning a wide age range, from infancy to old age (e.g., Bialystok et al, 2004, 2005, 2006; Costa et al, 2008; Kovács and Mehler, 2009; Bialystok, 2010), and on a wide array of tasks requiring conflict resolution (e.g., Flanker: Carlson and Meltzoff, 2008; Costa et al, 2008; Simon: Bialystok, 2006; Martin-Rhee and Bialystok, 2008; Stroop: Bialystok et al, 2008) In such tasks, congruent, incongruent, and neutral stimuli are presented, where incongruent trials require inhibition of irrelevant information while attending to task-relevant information. When bilingual advantages are observed, they are observed on the incongruent trials that require increased cognitive control (e.g., Costa et al, 2008; Prior and MacWhinney, 2010), recent studies have yielded overall bilingual advantages on cognitive control tasks, including the congruent trials (Costa et al, 2009)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
