Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

Abstract

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children’s linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and visuospatial working memory and SR performance in the same children. Participants were two groups of 35 children, 8–12 years of age: one group consisted of Albanian-Greek monoliterate bilingual children and the other of Greek monolingual children attending a monolingual-Greek educational setting. The findings demonstrate that the two groups performed similarly in the grammaticality scores of the SR. However, monolinguals outperformed the monoliterate bilinguals in SR accuracy, as well as in the visuospatial working memory and updating tasks. The findings did not indicate any bilingual advantage in cognitive performance. The results also demonstrate that updating and visuospatial working memory significantly predicted monolingual children’s SR accuracy scores, whereas Greek vocabulary predicted the performance of our monoliterate bilingual children in the same task. We attribute this outcome to the fact that monoliterate bilingual children do not rely on their fluid cognitive resources to perform the task, but instead rely on language proficiency (indicated by expressive vocabulary) while performing the SR.

Measures of Bilingual Cognition – From Infancy to Adolescence

“…Table 5 demonstrates that as with the infant and preschool groups, EF was the most frequently measured ability with school-age participants, with all 23 experiments measuring some component(s) of EF ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Antón, Duñabeitia, Estévez, Hernández, Castillo, Fuentes, et al, 2014 ; Bialystok & Viswanathan, 2009 ; Bosma, Hoekstra, Versloot, Arjen, & Blom, 2017 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ; Crespo et al, 2019 ; Czapka et al, 2020 ; de Abreu, 2011; de Abreu, Cruz-Santos, Tourinho, Martin, & Bialystok, 2012; Kapa & Colombo, 2013 ; Ladas, Carroll, & Vivas, 2015 ; Morales, Calvo, & Bialystok, 2013 ; Park, Ellis Weismer, & Kaushanskaya, 2018 ; Pino Escobar, Kalashnikova, & Escudero, 2018 ; Poarch, 2018 ; Poarch & van Hell, 2012 ; Poarch & Bialystok, 2015 ; Struys, Duyck, & Woumans, 2018 ; Tse & Altarriba, 2014 ; Vivas, Chrysochoou, Ladas, & Salvari, 2020 ). Attention was measured in 10 experiments using the ANT (attentional control: Antón et al, 2014 ; Kapa & Colombo, 2013 ; Ladas et al, 2015, Experiments 1 and 2 ; Poarch & van Hell, 2012, Experiment 2 ; Vivas et al, 2020 ), Simon task (attentional control: Poarch & van Hell, 2012, Experiment 1 ; Tse & Altarriba, 2014 ), and Sky Search task (selective attention; Bosma et al, 2017 ; de Abreu et al, 2012).…”

“…Working memory was assessed in ten experiments ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ; Czapka et al, 2020 ; de Abreu, 2011; de Abreu et al, 2012; Morales et al, 2013, Study 1 & 2 ; Park et al, 2018 ; Tse & Altarriba, 2014 ). Four experiments measured verbal WM using Counting Recall, Forward and Backward Digit Span, and Non-Word Repetition tasks ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ; de Abreu, 2011).…”

“…Working memory was assessed in ten experiments ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ; Czapka et al, 2020 ; de Abreu, 2011; de Abreu et al, 2012; Morales et al, 2013, Study 1 & 2 ; Park et al, 2018 ; Tse & Altarriba, 2014 ). Four experiments measured verbal WM using Counting Recall, Forward and Backward Digit Span, and Non-Word Repetition tasks ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ; de Abreu, 2011). Visuospatial WM was tested in four experiments using Forward and Backward Dot Matrix, Odd-One-Out, Rotating Figure, and Frog Matrices (variant of Corsi Blocks) tasks ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; de Abreu et al, 2012; Morales et al, 2013, Study 2 ).…”

“…Four experiments measured verbal WM using Counting Recall, Forward and Backward Digit Span, and Non-Word Repetition tasks ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ; de Abreu, 2011). Visuospatial WM was tested in four experiments using Forward and Backward Dot Matrix, Odd-One-Out, Rotating Figure, and Frog Matrices (variant of Corsi Blocks) tasks ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Bosma et al, 2017 ; de Abreu et al, 2012; Morales et al, 2013, Study 2 ). WM was additionally assessed in five experiments using a Simon-like task (the Pictures task) with different levels of WM demand ( Morales et al, 2013, Study 1 ), the Operation Span task ( Tse & Altarriba, 2014 ), the Corsi Blocks task and the N -back task (‘updating’; Andreou et al, 2021 ; Czapka et al, 2020 ; Park et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Non-verbal intelligence was measured in two experiments using the Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices test ( Andreou et al, 2021 ; Cockcroft, 2016 ). The Raven’s test was also used by de Abreu et al (2012) to measure ‘abstract reasoning ability’.…”