Literacy, metalinguistic, and executive functions processing in bilingual children speakers of similar typology languages in a border area

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze whether there are differences between bilingual (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish) and monolingual (Brazilian Portuguese) school children regarding reading and writing learning achievement, in executive functions (EF) components and metalinguistic abilities. Twenty-three bilingual and 23 monolingual children, aged 6 to 8 years, were assessed in terms of their writing, reading, and metalinguistic abilities, and with verbal and non-verbal tasks testing EF. A bilingual advantage was observed in reading and writing abilities and in 16 of the 44 EF measures, including subcomponents of working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and executive attention, mainly in non-verbal paradigms, while monolingual children outperformed bilingual ones in three scores: counting errors (Five Digits Test), omission of bells (Bells test) and sequential trial B (Trail Making Test). There were moderate and weak effect sizes in metalinguistic subcomponents showing bilingual advantage. Literacy improvement seems to have the potential to increase linguistic and cognitive abilities.

Translanguaging in oral and written production in multilingualism: a systematic review

“…Public bilingual schools in the country have already been offered from north to south, including states such as Amazonas, Maranhão, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. This growing interest in bilingualism and the emergence of bilingual schools/education may have various causes, including migration factors, the reality of border regions, demands from indigenous populations, the strengthening of public and associative language policies, or still people's search for the achievement of social status (LIBERALI; MEGALE, 2016), for the access to global information and knowledge, or for the promotion of cognitive benefits that can result from being bilingual, as shown by several studies (BIALYSTOK; BARAC, 2012;KLEIFGEN, 2018;GONÇALVES et al, 2021). The expansion and popularization of bilingual education and the revival of language preservation policies point to the discussion of the translanguaging theory and signal the status and relevance of scientific studies that explain this phenomenon of bilingualism under the translanguaging epistemology.…”

Bibliometric Analysis of Educational Researches on Bilingualism

“…(2022), and Broersma et al (2020 conducted studies on code switching in bilinguals. Gonçalves et al (2021) examined whether there is a difference between the reading and writing achievements of bilingual and monolingual children. Stoehr and Martin (2022) searched the effects of language skills on each other in bilinguals whereas Engemann (2022) emphasized the difference between bilingual and monolingual children.…”