Instruction in second language enhances linguistic and cognitive abilities in first language as well: evidence from public school education in Nepal

Trilingual parallel processing: Do the dominant languages grab all the attention?

“…We predicted our participants to exhibit accumulative and facilitative effect in processing the parallel activations of the three languages that we tested on them. Theoretically, we expected our study to support the interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1979a(Cummins, , 1979b(Cummins, , 1991 that predicts additive effect as children add a second language as their linguistic and academic tool kit (Cummins, 2000(Cummins, , 2007 that enhances their linguistic and academic performance (see Pathak et al, 2021 for the study that found instruction in second language enhances linguistic and cognitive abilities in first language as well). We would expect that if adding a second language to the first language repertoire had additive benefit, addition of a third language would also show up additional advantage when processing three languages simultaneously.…”

Initiating and Institutionalizing Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics in Nepal: A Report

“…We have started doing some impactful work and have started publishing in peer-reviewed impact factor scientific international journals. At present, we are using MouseTracker as our main tool for investigating cognitive and psycholinguistic processing mechanisms (for studies published from our lab using this tool, see Pathak et al 2021;Pathak et al under review). We have developed reasonable expertise in statistical analysis using SPSS and R as statistical analysis softwares.…”

A Study on Bilingual Verbal Fluency Task to Measure the Effect of Instruction in First and Second Language Performance

“…Despite such discourse about the choice and use of a particular language in education, there is no scientific study that can establish with scientific reliability and validity that teaching in first language of the child actually improves cognitive performance as it is not adequately documented in the literature. A recent study by Pathak et al (2021) investigated the effect of second language instruction on first language and found cognitive and linguistic advantage of second language instruction on first language. Pathak & Pathak (2022) found bilingual advantage in bilingual Stroop task administered on high and low proficient Nepali -English bilinguals.…”