Language proficiency and executive control in bilingual children

Iluz-Cohen, Peri; Armon-Lotem, Sharon

doi:10.1017/s1366728912000788

Cited by 84 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(101 reference statements)

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“…For interference suppression, however, a significant difference between the bilingual SLI group and the bilingual typically developing group emerged. This result is consistent with a previous study on bilingual children with low language proficiency who demonstrated deficits on an embedded figure task involving misleading contexts (Iluz‐Cohen and Armon‐Lotem ). Importantly, a significant difference on interference suppression did not emerge when the bilingual SLI group was compared with the monolingual typically developing group.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Published studies on bilingual children with SLI are extremely rare and, so far, focused almost exclusively on morphosyntactic development (see Paradis , for a review). To our knowledge, only one study has explored executive functioning in bilingual children with low language proficiency (Iluz‐Cohen and Armon‐Lotem ). This study included 10 sequential bilingual English−Hebrew speaking children that were designated as ‘low language proficiency’ group (not SLI) by the authors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Specific language impairment in language‐minority children from low‐income families

Abreu

Cruz-Santos

Puglisi

2014

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual children with SLI. Studying bilinguals with SLI is important, especially in the light of increasing evidence that bilingualism can bring advantages in certain domains of executive functioning. Aims: To determine whether executive functioning represents an area of difficulty for bilingual language-minority children with SLI and, if so, which specific executive processes are affected. Methods & Procedures:This cross-cultural research was conducted with bilingual children from Luxembourg and monolingual children from Portugal who all had Portuguese as their first language. The data from 81 eight-year-olds from the following three groups were analysed: (1) 15 Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg with an SLI diagnosis; (2) 33 typically developing Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg; and (3) 33 typically developing Portuguese-speaking monolinguals from Portugal. Groups were matched on first language, ethnicity, chronological age and socioeconomic status, and they did not differ in nonverbal intelligence. Children completed a battery of tests tapping: expressive and receptive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, verbal and visuospatial working memory, selective attention and interference suppression. Outcomes & Results:The bilingual SLI group performed equally well compared with their typically developing peers on measures of visuospatial working memory, but had lower scores than both control groups on tasks of verbal working memory. On measures of selective attention and interference suppression, typically developing children who were bilingual outperformed their monolingual counterparts. For selective attention, performance of the bilingual SLI group did not differ significantly from the controls. For interference suppression the bilingual SLI group performed significantly less well than typically developing bilinguals but not monolinguals. Conclusions & Implications:This research provides further support to the position that SLI is not a language-specific disorder. The study indicates that although bilingual children with SLI do not demonstrate the same advantages in selective attention and interference suppression as typically developing bilinguals, they do not lag behind typically developing monolinguals in these domains of executive functioning. This finding raises the possibility that bilingualism might represent a protective factor against some of the cognitive limitations that are associated with SLI in monolinguals.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specific language impairment in language‐minority children from low‐income families

Abreu

Cruz-Santos

Puglisi

2014

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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“…Bedore et al, 2012 on assessing language dominance). Several aspects known to vary in bilingual experience have been argued to have an effect on executive function performance, such as proficiency (Gutiérrez-Clellen, Calderón, & Ellis Weismer, 2004;Iluz-Cohen & Armon-Lotem, 2013;Rosselli, Ardila, Lalwani, & Vélez-Uribe, 2015), language dominance (Mueller Gathercole et al, 2014;Weber, Johnson, Riccio, & Liew, 2015), language exposure (Brito, Sebastián-Gallés, & Barr, 2015), and patterns of language switching (de Bruin et al, 2015;Verreyt, Woumans, Vandelanotte, Szmalec, & Duyck, 2015;Scaltritti, Peressotti, & Miozzo, 2015;Soveri, Rodriguez-Fornells, & Laine, 2011). A number of researchers are now calling for the integration of the variability of bilingual experience in the analyses (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

Cat

Gusnanto

Serratrice

2017

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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The literature exploring the executive function correlates of bilingualism is vast, but to date, few studies have concentrated on children, for whom the bilingual advantage appears even more inconsistent than for adults. We investigate a highly heterogeneous group of children (in terms of bilingual experience and socio-economic status) and identify the critical threshold of bilingual experience from which an advantage can be observed at group level. The modeling methods adopted allow the use of fine-grained, continuous factors for age and socio-economic status, thereby effectively controlling for their effect and isolating the specific effect of bilingual experience. We pioneer the use of Cox Proportional Hazard regression to analyze performance in the Simon task. This allows the modeling of all data points without transformation nor outlier removal, and captures both accuracy and reaction time within the same analysis, while also being able to handle multiple predictor variables.

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“…language proficiency, age of second language acquisition, etc.) have found that they are related to cognitive control functioning (Iluz-Cohen & Armon-Lotem, 2013; Luk, DeSa, & Bialystok, 2011; Prior & Gollan, 2011). In our case, the bilinguals we test, generally, come from immigrant homes where Spanish is primarily spoken.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the bilingual advantage: The potential role of genes and environment on the development of cognitive control

Hernández

Greene

Vaughn

et al. 2015

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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In recent years there has been considerable debate about the presence or absence of a bilingual advantage in tasks that involve cognitive control. Our previous work has established evidence of differences in brain activity between monolinguals and bilinguals in both word learning and in the avoidance of interference during a picture selection task. Recent models of cognitive control have highlighted the importance of a set of neural structures that may show differential tuning due to exposure to two languages. There is also evidence that genetic factors play a role in the availability of dopamine in neural structures involved in cognitive control. Thus, it is important to investigate whether there are interactions effects generating variability in language acquisition when attributed to genetic (e.g., characteristics of dopamine turnover) and environmental (e.g., exposure to two languages) factors. Here preliminary results from genotyping of a sample of bilingual and monolingual individuals are reported. They reveal different distributions in allele frequencies of the DRD2/ANKK1 taq1A polymorphism. These results bring up the possibility that bilinguals may exhibit additional flexibility due to differences in genetic characteristics relative to monolinguals. Future studies should consider genotype as a possible contributing factor to the development of cognitive control across individuals with different language learning histories.

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Language proficiency and executive control in bilingual children

Cited by 84 publications

References 62 publications

Specific language impairment in language‐minority children from low‐income families

Specific language impairment in language‐minority children from low‐income families

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

Beyond the bilingual advantage: The potential role of genes and environment on the development of cognitive control

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