The Relationship Between Bilingualism and the Performance of Spatial Tasks

Abstract

The well-documented evidence that bilinguals demonstrate cognitive advantages over monolinguals is used as a foundation for the hypothesis that bilinguals will be better able to solve certain spatial tasks, and a theoretical framework for this hypothesis is constructed. The paper describes an experiment to explore this hypothesis. A series of spatial test items involving the comparison of diagrams of like and unlike pairs of knotted and unknotted ropes at varying orientations was given to 41 subjects. The subjects were 11 balanced bilingual Welsh/English and 30 monolingual English speakers. Bilinguals performed the tasks more quickly than monolinguals. The tasks were intended to stimulate the use of mental imagery in their execution. There was a difference in complexity across the 72 test items and some of the tasks were processed more slowly than others by all subjects. For example, rotation of one of the pair increased the processing time for both monolinguals and bilinguals. The results indicate that, as well as showing greater pro ciency overall, bilinguals were better able to deal with the more complex tasks. The ndings are taken to show a relationship between some aspects of spatial ability, mental imagery and bilingual language processing.

Dual language development of Latino children: Effect of instructional program type and the home and school language environment

“…These findings align with previous research indicating that dual language children who begin school with higher language abilities continue to develop each faster than children who enter with lower proficiencies (Oller & Eilers, 2002; Sparks et al, 2009). These are important findings considering that children with strong dual language proficiencies may also benefit from cognitive correlates of bilingualism (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010), such as greater metalinguistic and metacognitive skills (Bialystok, 2001), stronger symbolic representation, abstract reasoning skills (McLeay, 2003), and better learning strategies (Wilson, Dickinson, & Rowe, 2013). The benefits associated with bilingualism are mostly confined to children who have extensive bilingual experience, while those children with limited proficiency in one of their languages are not as likely to demonstrate the same cognitive advantages (Wilson et al, 2013).…”

Language study in higher education and the development of criticality1

“…But we do have to ask whether this is because they are sophisticated rather than because they are language learners, for we all know there may be polyglots who remain singularly lacking in motivation to question and problematize while being able to communicate effectively across cultures and languages. However, recent literature on bilingualism has shown conclusively clear cognitive advantages in bilinguals over monolinguals in a range of domains (Bialystok 1992(Bialystok , 1994Bialystok and Majumder 1998;Bialystok 1999;Kroll and Tokowicz 2001;McLeay 2003), and significant brain differences in these two populations have been reported recently, e.g. the corpus callosum is more developed in bilinguals (Coggins, Kennedy and Armstrong 2004).…”

Conflict resolution in sentence processing by bilinguals

“…The finding that bilingual children were better able to control attention to syntax in the context of conflicting semantic information led to a series of studies that demonstrated that this increased control of attention extended to nonverbal tasks in both children (Bialystok & Majumder, 1998; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Goetz, 2003) and adults bilinguals (Bialystok et al, 2005; Costa et al, 2008; Colzato et al, 2008; McLeay, 2003). The interpretation of these advantages was that domain-general executive function mechanisms are used to control attention to the target language (Green, 1998) to resolve the conflict that comes from both languages being constantly active in bilinguals (Schwartz and Kroll, 2006; Spivey & Marian, 1999; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998).…”