Losing access to the second language and its effect on executive function development in childhood: The case of 'returnees'

Comparing the Dimensions of Executive Functions in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

“…The results showed that bilingual children performed better than monolingual children in all components of executive functions, and they achieved a higher total score. These findings are consistent with the findings of multiple studies, including Salvatira, Rosselli, 2011;Woumans, Duyck, 2015;Krizman, Skoe, Kraus, 2016;Chung-Fat, Sorge and Bialystok, 2017;Crespo, et al, 2019;Kubota et al, 2020. However, there are still a few studies that show conflicting results (Arizmandi et al, 2018;Nichols et al, 2020).…”

“…Various factors could underlie the superior performance of bilingual children in terms of executive functions. Among bilingual children, an important factor is the cognitive use of both languages, which is constantly active during language processing, leading to more consistent language monitoring among bilingual children (Kubota et al, 2020). Additional research also shows that bilingual individuals must continually attend to one language over the other while actively inhibiting usage of the unattended language (Woumans & Duyck, 2015).…”

“…The results of the previous studies on the relationship between executive functions and bilingualism have been inconsistent. For example, Bialystok (2017) and Kubota, Chevalier, and Sorace (2020) found that bilingual children show better performance with respect to executive functions, while Arizmendi, et al, (2018) Nichols, et al, (2020 found no difference in terms of executive functions among bilinguals and monolinguals. This discrepancy between results suggests that the relationship between bilingualism and the development of executive functions requires further research (DeLuca, et al, 2020).…”

Linguistic consequences of toing and froing: factors that modulate narrative development in bilingual returnee children

“…That is, children who experienced at least 40% of reduction in L2 exposure show effects of attrition in their TTR and VU. This finding is in fact in line with a study by (Kubota, Chevalier, and Sorace 2020b) which demonstrated that losing 40% or more exposure to the L2 may have attenuated effects of bilingualism on their development in executive function.…”

“…Of course, much more research is warranted to determine if this (at least) 40% threshold is at all generalizable. Given the high theoretical and practical significance of revealing what the threshold of minimal exposure for maintenance is, the fact that the divide we see in our data is not random and, better yet, overlaps with the same percentage found in Kubota, Chevalier, and Sorace (2020b), is promising. On the theoretical side, knowing what levels of input, among other factors, are required for linguistic maintenance can help adjudicate between competing models of attrition, on the one hand, as well as shed some (unique) light on the underlying mechanisms.…”