Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

Abstract

Many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing executive functioning, but other studies have not revealed any effect of bilingualism. In this study we compared three groups of bilingual children in the Netherlands, aged 6–7 years, with a monolingual control group. We were specifically interested in testing whether the bilingual cognitive advantage is modulated by the sociolinguistic context of language use. All three bilingual groups were exposed to a minority language besides the nation’s dominant language (Dutch). Two bilingual groups were exposed to a regional language (Frisian, Limburgish), and a third bilingual group was exposed to a migrant language (Polish). All children participated in two working memory tasks (verbal, visuospatial) and two attention tasks (selective attention, interference suppression). Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on selective attention. The cognitive effect of bilingualism was most clearly present in the Frisian-Dutch group and in a subgroup of migrant children who were relatively proficient in Polish. The effect was less robust in the Limburgish-Dutch sample. Investigation of the response patterns of the flanker test, testing interference suppression, suggested that bilingual children more often show an effect of response competition than the monolingual children, demonstrating that bilingual children attend to different aspects of the task than monolingual children. No bilingualism effects emerged for verbal and visuospatial working memory.

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“…Although bilingual children' scores on this task were higher than children with typical development, group differences just failed to reach the criterion for statistical significance. These results are also consistent with recent increasing studies of bilingual advantage on working memory tasks [47][48][49][50]. Bilingual superiority in working memory tasks are thought to be arising from the continuous selection and processing of lexical information in two languages.…”

Benefits of foreign language learning and bilingualism: An analysis of published empirical research 2012–2019

“…According to earlier research by Rueda, Posner, Rothbart, and Davis‐Stober (), this area of human development deals with the ability to allocate attention to relevant objects or locations (orienting), maintaining a state of readiness (alertness), and selecting the most goal‐relevant response (executive control). Studies in this theme explored the relationship between bilingualism and selective attention (Blom, Boerma, Bosma, Cornips, & Everaert, ; Chung‐Fat‐Yim, Sorge, & Bialystok, ), attentional processes in low SES bilingual children (Ladas, Carrol, & Vivas, ; Yang & Yang, ), and the role of attentional control in senior adults (Ong, Sewell, Weekes, McKague, & Abutalebi, ). Collectively, the findings supported the bilingual advantage in attentional control tasks and particularly stressed the positive impact of early childhood and adult bilingualism on the attentional system.…”

A code-switching asymmetry in bilingual children: Code-switching from Dutch to Frisian requires more cognitive control than code-switching from Frisian to Dutch

“…There was substantial individual variation on the Flanker task, in particular for the Flanker effect, as revealed by the large SDs. Inspection of the data indicated that this was caused by 18 children who responded relatively fast in the incongruent condition (see also Blom et al, 2017;Rouder & King, 2003). As this pertained to a clear minority of the children in the sample and as the data could not be considered outliers, we decided to include these data in our analyses.…”